Re: Can we, or are we ever likely to artificially create a singularity?

Hi Glen!

A nice, short question: can we eventually create (and harness) singularities? Assuming you are referring to small, artificial "black holes" created in, say particle collisions (as opposed to the massive ones in space formed by the collapse of giant stars), the short answer is: not likely.

You may or may not be aware of recent controversy around the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The main concern, (propagated by a small number of vocal activists with a limited understanding of particle physics) is that high-energy particle collisions could produce stable black holes that could be trapped in the Earth's core and destroy the planet!

Exciting stuff to be sure, but the reality is (fortunately!) rather more boring. While we obviously can't know all of the unknowns, the Earth and all other heavenly bodies have been bombarded by extremely high-energy particles for billions of years. If high-energy particle collisions could actually create stable black holes with any significant probability, the Earth (or one of the other planets in the solar system, or our sun, or the hundred billion other stars in our galaxy, or...) would have been swallowed up over the past few billion years. Neutron stars couldn't live more than a billion years (and we know several that are older than this). And so on... A very nice, not too technical presentation about "safety" studies already done by CERN physicists can be found here.

So the good news is that man-made particle collisions are not going to produce a stable singularity that will destroy the Earth. This is, however, not-so-good news if you were hoping that you COULD produce and harness a man-made singularity. Theoretically, light black holes are not yet completely ruled out, but neither are they a necessary part of any current theory. And even in models where they COULD be created in a particle collision, established conservation laws demand that they would have very short lifetimes (i.e not stay around long enough to be very useful).

Talk about a long answer to a short question...

In short, not quite bad Star Trek episode (I'm amazed at the stuff those writers try to get away with!), but not likely either.

I hope this helps!

Cheers,
Sam