The Black Hole Project was written as a series of five novellas concerning a project that takes place over several decades in the twenty-third century. The novellas were published in Analog as follows: "Kremer's Limit" in the July/August 2006 issue, "Imperfect Gods" in the December 2006 issue, "The Small Pond" in the March 2007 issue, "Loki's Realm" in the July/August 2007 issue and "Vertex" in the September 2007 issue.
We created an online glossary to go with the series which can be found at
http://www.gdnordley.com/_files/BHP_Glossary.html
What we have to say about the science (and speculative engineering) behind the story can be found there. Generally, we played within established science, then added to it here and there references to papers not yet written by physicists who have not yet lived--to stand as placeholders for the real discoveries to come. Some of our current black hole science is not well-established, being only a step or two away from conjecture and encouragingly evidence free. We felt free to modify some of that with our future papers.
The BHP was mostly written when all the nonsense broke out about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) might make a mini black hole that would "eat" the Earth. Suddenly, life and art found themselves on parallel courses–and the press conference scene that opened "Kremer's Limit" might have been taken from the current news. Actually, our first draft had come some seven years earlier.
Concerning the LHC, many (including Stephen Hawking) have noted that nature produces far more energetic collisions with cosmic rays without creating black holes. The 14 TeV collisions that the LHC might eventually produce have a mass equivalent of 2.5 e-23 kg. That's about 1/400th of the mass of a small virus. Of course, that is the equivalent of some 15,000 neutrons so it's pretty impressive on an atomic scale. A black hole of that mass would have a Schwarzchild radius of about 1.85 e-50 m (this would be fourteen orders of magnitude smaller than the Plank scale of 1.6163 e-35 m) and a Hawking lifetime of about 1.73 e-85 seconds. Allowing me some poetic license, that's not long enough to exist in the quantized Planck regime, let alone eat anything. Of course, the foregoing calculation is gotten by applying a continuous, classical model to a regime in which the as yet unknown laws of quantum gravity rule. It is for illustration only; don't try this at home! But rest assured that a planet-eating thousandth of an attogram black hole is manifestly not what could be anticipated from a 14 TeV proton collision!
Of course, if physicists knew exactly what to expect with certainty, we wouldn't have to do the experiment, would we?
A somewhat more interesting worry has surfaced recently, and somewhat humorously, in the accelerator world, out of frustrations involved in getting the LHC up and running. To understand this, one has to understand that relativity does not prohibit time travel (nor faster than light travel, which is equivalent). It simply describes the contradictory results of such "closed time-like loops," which are usually two inconsistent states of being (grandfather is dead, grandfather is not dead). If one considers a time travel event to cause the erasure of its future cause (absolutely, or in a new branch of space time) then Larry Niven's time travel law applies. Once a time machine is invented, time travelers keep changing history until a history is arrived at in which a time machine hasn't het been invented. Only such a history can have observers.
With the above as background, it has been (with tongue firmly in-cheek) suggested that the LHC collisions send particles into the past that alter history (through the "butterfly effect, I suppose) until a chain of events is arrived at in which the LHC doesn't work. Unfortunately for this charming interpretation of the LHC's problems, it would seem that the energetic cosmic ray argument negates this as well it negates the ravenous sub-planck-scale black hole.
At the end of "Vertex," preliminary results of the experiment indicate that there has been some unexplained mass loss. This is another placeholder for whatever new physics is found as a result of the experiment; the reason for doing it in the first place.
--GDN, Nov. 2009
©2009 G. David Nordley
