Re: Can anyone sum up the current state of the micro-black-hole discussion?

First, a couple of things:

1) CERN and FermiLab produce nowhere near the high energies naturally produced by cosmic rays...not by orders of magnitude. If you were worried about black holes swallowing the Earth, you would be more concerned with nature. I mean, in the few short years we've been able to observe them, we've seen cosmic protons with a Joule of energy...about 10 million times the energy we can create in the lab (10^12 eV is a TeV, which is close to what we currently can make at a huge accelerator). And that's been going on for millions of years.

2) If they did create tiny black holes, those black holes would radiate away their mass as Hawking radiation (i.e. evaporate, and black hole evaporation happens faster the smaller the black hole is), based on currently understood physics. Search the web for Hawking radiation, that will get you started on that enormous topic. The signature of micro-black holes would come out as a suppression of the outgoing radiation that represented very short-range phenomena (i.e. stuff that got temporarily swallowed by the black hole). They were worried about this with RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collidor, as well...but nothing ever came of it.