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The cosmos could be dotted with black holes so small they could slip between atoms, suggests a wild new theory.
And we could be creating these teenage singularities all the time in the world’s largest atom destroyer, new study shows. If we could make these objects, they could be a window into the mysterious nature of gravity.
Related: Photo: the largest atom destroyer in the world
A size too small
we have four fundamental forces of nature (at least, what we know so far): electromagnetism, strong force, weak force is severity. All four forces operate at different distances, have different carriers, and interact in different ways. They also have very different strengths.
And no matter how you affect it, gravity is always the weakest. Gravity is such a weak force that if it were a billion billion times stronger than it currently is, it would still be the weakest force by a factor of about 10 million.
Go ahead and lift the device you are reading on above your head. Congratulations. Your arm muscles have temporarily overcome the gravitational pull of the entire planet Land.
Gravity is so ridiculously weak that physicists have begun to wonder why. After all, something so weird, weird, out of place is practically begging for an explanation.
Linked to this strangely weak gravity problem (known as the “hierarchy problem” in physics circles) is another problem of how fundamental forces are tied together.
At high energies, weak electromagnetic and nuclear forces fuse together into a single unified force (called, of course, the “electroweak” force). We have evidence that at even higher energies, even the strong nuclear force joins the unification party. And it has been speculated that at extremely high energies, gravity also merges with the other forces. But the energy required is so high that we could not hope to reach it, even with a particle accelerator the size of our galaxy.
Why is gravity so weak and why does it take so much energy to potentially fuse it with other forces?
A wave of darkness
The short version is that we don’t know. One hypothesis is that there is more to the universe than meets the eye. Specifically, there are more spatial dimensions than the three we know of. In this view, there are the usual up-down, left-right and forward-backward directions, plus … a few more. The exact number depends on the theory.
In this potential explanation for gravity’s weakness, the extra dimensions are so large that our universe is embedded in a much larger, higher dimensional mass made up of extra dimensions.
In this story, gravity is actually very strong, but unlike other forces (which are tied to our 3D universe), gravity can roam freely between all dimensions. This dilutes the strength, making it look like wea.
In these models, because gravity is actually so strong, it would be possible to fuse gravity to much lower energy levels. In other words, we may not need a galaxy-sized particle accelerator to see gravity join the unification party. We may also just need something much smaller. Like, let’s say, the Large Hadron Collider, a 16.5-mile (27-kilometer) long ring on the border between France and Switzerland, where protons are sent to collide with each other at almost the speed of light.
The rules of the game
How would the LHC locate those extra hidden dimensions? One way would be through the production of microscopic black holes. It normally takes an insane amount of density and pressure to form a black hole – compressing matter so that it collapses to a point of infinite density is not an easy trick. And if gravity is really as weak as it sounds, then we don’t have enough energy inside the LHC to make it happen.
Related: The greatest achievements of the black hole
But if gravity were actually much stronger, we could easily overwhelm other forces of nature and produce black holes. If gravity is strong enough, we could already be producing small black holes in the LHC right now.
These tiny black holes are no cause for alarm: they would evaporate in less than 10 ^ minus 27 seconds, transmuting into a shower of particles long before doing something interesting like swallow the Earth. But to date, we haven’t seen any of the particle sprays suggestive of microscopic black holes or extra dimensions.
But in an article agreed to be published in Physical Review D and entered into the prepress database arXiv, a team of theoretical physicists pointed out that maybe we are missing something. Previous calculations of how often the LHC would create microscopic black holes have made some simple assumptions about how black holes would form and how they would interact with the universe around them.
The most accurate calculations from this group reveal that, assuming all those extra dimensions exist and gravity is secretly superstrong, the LHC can produce far fewer microscopic black holes than we had previously made. Depending on the number of hypothetical extra dimensions, the number of these teenage black holes could be one-tenth of previous estimates.
This means that all hope is not lost in the search for extra dimensions and the potential hidden force of gravity. We may have to keep the LHC running longer before we can rule out these models.
And if a microscopic black hole were to appear in our data, it would mean that what we think of as the universe is just a small bubble embedded in a much larger structure – and we would have to completely rewrite our understanding of gravity.
Originally published on LiveScience.
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