Cnet is reporting on a New York Times story that started making the rounds a few days ago about how physicists may have created quantum black holes. Even though I’m no longer a practicing physicist, I still love this stuff and it’s especially cool to hear about things from experiments that you or colleagues were working on. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) experiment studies the results of collisions between gold nuclei. One of my old professors is a part of the experiment and told me about it years ago when they were in the planning stages. He said that the goal was to create a quark gluon plasma, a whole new state of matter.
While they are not yet claiming to have created a quark gluon plasma, they do seem to have created something that at least acts like a mini black hole, though not necessarily the quantum black holes of theory. When I first heard this story, I couldn’t help but think of the SciFi series Lexx or the Dan Simmons’ novel Hyperion. In each of these, scientists created black holes with disasterous results for the Earth. Don’t panic yet! Nothing that’s been done in high energy particle accelerators is anything to worry about, but I did always wonder if we’d find something unexpected out at Fermilab. Man I still love this stuff! The real fun is going to begin when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) comes online and begins to create conditions at the interaction point very much like those in the early universe shortly after the Big Bang.