Public Service Announcement: Black Holes @ RHIC

Why didn't I see this coming?  As early QD readers may remember from my post on the QD launch date (Jan 13), I was very enthusiastic about a paper by Horatieu Nastase which made an intriguing claim that RHIC collisions produce "Dual Black Holes", and calculated some  properties of  various collisions (both of two protons and two nuclei) based on this claim.   Unfortunately, some reporters have gotten to Horatieu and it seems to have created a press firestorm overseas.

I stumbled on this the usual way, via slashdot.org. This piece led straightaway to a story at the BBC website (from which I stole this image).  And a quick scan of Google news led to several more articles, and I don't think we've heard the last of this: it's a science fiction dream-come-true, and a doomsayer's worst nightmare (and dream-come-true in some sense...)

Unfortunately, all of this is overstated.  At RHIC we don't make a "real" black hole, in the sense envisioned by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.  Rather, Nastase's point of view is that RHIC collisions can be described by a "dual" black hole.  But what does "dual" mean in this context?  It's not "two-ness" in any sense, but rather indicates that one can write down a theory which describes the collision as a black hole, but in a completely different world than that we see around us.  To make his model work, he (and many other researchers who are exploring this direction) make a calculation of a black hole in 10 dimensions in order to describe difficult (but gravitationally benign) aspects of the strong interaction in 4 dimensions. 

This is not to undersell how interesting RHIC collisions are: if we in fact can use this "dual black hole" language to describe the collisions we are making daily, this may be a real advance in our understanding.  But no-one I have ever spoken to has suggested that this black hole can or does act like a traditional black hole in our observed universe (although this possibility has been considered, and has been generally discounted as an implausible scenario).

Comments

[jamie]

Hello Peter,

I do not know why you use the term "firestorm".
I see a string of articles, many of them
getting the basic facts wrong, but not predicting
anything very bad or sounding any alarm bells.
In fact, the idea of a black
hole spam filter created at RHIC and sold for $19.99
sounds like a great idea. Remember, just like
magnets for joint pain, it does not actually have
to work to sell.

Jamie

[Peter]

Granted, that it's not quite a storm yet. But given the way the press coverage developed in 1999, I guess I'm bracing myself.

[Ian]

Black hole spam filter!?
Firestorm or not, call the venture capitalists!

[Peter]

And face the fiery wrath of the Register.co.uk lawyers? No thanks.

[Jason]

I would like to say thank you for taking the time to shed some light on this topic.

Here's a question that I would like some clarification on.

Why is this now being presented as only a mathematical analog to a black hole? Why not just address the fact that these very tiny black holes are predicted to evaporate very quickly and pose no danger to us?

By the way, I was very excited to read the news! I am facinated by this phase transition and hope we nail down the particulars to this phenomena soon!!!

[can'tBme]

ok-, So now that I've read this, am I in that dimiension where I know about it? If I hadn't would I only be in one of the other 9? How many degrees of freedom do we really have? How predictable was it that I would have been thinking about this sort of thing at this "point in time"? Is it an persons destiny to figure out what this means? What if nobody does, and it's important to our survival? Why did I post this "stupid" message?

[Gordon Watts]

We used to have protesteres outside Fermilab once a year trying to shut down the Tevatron because we would acceidentally create a new universe in our collisions. And the new universe would obliterate this one (de sitter universes). :-)

[Kenneth]

think about this a propulsion system
using blackhole theory

[soma]

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[mommy]

http://www.infochip.net/wwwboard/messages/19129.html chokeddiscoverthud

[Alladin]

gjkjk okjk

[Christian Jay Marshall]

RHIC black hole sucking my tax dollars!

Come on!

I love science but give the little guys down here a break.

You think this kind of science is going to make a difference.

So what if you figure out the origins of the big bang or why black holes suck or blow chunks.

What you are really doing is making a fool of yourself, thinking you have the clever answer to it all.

and then what?

The answer to the universe and everything in it is "42"

Ever think that maybe some of the science you are doing is making life bad for your genetic code or causing brain damage or that maybe messing with the fabric of space and time might screw it all up.

Let me guess you were one of those kids that always asked "WHY?", then you got the answer and it was a slap upside the head for asking the question in the first place.

Science is a process that is only available to you now, but will be worthless to you later.

Like searching for the parts of the donut that were at one time the hole.

http://www-donut.fnal.gov/

[Jim]

I think Eiensite's theory of relativity is the key step towards in-depth study of this new theory.