Lab fireball 'may be black hole'

BBC News ^ | 3/17/2005

[Bigh4u2]

See!

I knew there would be someone here smart enough to figure it out.

:0)

[Finger Monkey]

Cool. I'm going to try it.

[-YYZ-]

Errrrr, that's assuming they're using billion in the north american sense, not the british sense. Whoever wrote that article is innumerate and/or scientifically illiterate. They might just as well have said "an extremely tiny fraction of a second" for all that most would understand it - scientific notation is the only reasonable way to write a number with that many zeros in it.

[Clay Moore]

"This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second"

Wow! Isn't that about the same amount of time as passed from when "Waterworld" came out in the theater and when it hit the video stores?

[NY-YANK]

"an extremely tiny fraction of a second"

Sounds good, lets go with that.

[LexBaird]

When I was in HS electronics, I built a cattle prod with 2 d-cells, a step-up transformer and a large capacitor. Ain't HS kids inventive?

[bassmaner]

There is actually a book about this...can't remember the name. The CERN scientists created a tiny opening into another universe. An alien collective organism noticed this and sent a nanomachine through the hole. The nanomachine used the concrete in the walls of the building to construct an army (millions of flies with instantly fatal bites, etc.) with which to kill everyone on earth and establish a colony of its own kind. It would take only a couple of days to kill everything on earth.

I read this one too - the name of the book is "Einstein's Bridge". It came out shortly after the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) project was scrapped by Congress back in the mid '90s. I can't remember the author's name.

[Daus]

I built a cattle prod

I hope you actually lived near some cattle. :)

[Fast1]

Just what I was thinking!

[WestVirginiaRebel]

You don't wanna mess around with this kind of stuff, that's for sure...

[hosepipe]

If... 10 million, billion, billionths of a second... can even happen at all..
It raises a pregnant or at least a poinant question..
Did it really happen.. or was the clock/device measured it flawed.?.

Kind of like if a tree falls in the forest and nobody was there to hear it ... blah blah blah..

or the proverbial I have my truth and you have yours..
If that was true, then, that makes those truths an opinion.. as liberals think all truth is..

Question: What happens when you sequister some liberals in a cylotron and expect them to come up with a logical thought.?.
Answer: Humans love a good story, liberals know that.. and will provide one..

[Chinito]

"However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat.", Whew...had me worried there for a second. Glad to know people playing around with black holes aren't a threat.

Man, I hope you ended that with a tacit "/sarcasm". I remember reading that one of the biggest worries connected to the Manhattan Project was that they would ignite the whole of the earth's atmosphere. "There goes the atmosphere, oh bother!".

[Bigh4u2]

Is the cup half full or half empty?

[TexasCajun]

Outlaw Black-Holes Now!

[LexBaird]

I hope you actually lived near some cattle. :)

Not near enough, so I had to find ... um, other means of testing.

[beezdotcom]

Yeah, but then only .5% of the readers would have any idea what that means.

Yeah, but how many of the other 99.5% really need to read about black holes, anyway?

[hosepipe]

[ Is the cup half full or half empty? ]

Depends on whether its at the level it was filled to <- half or some extent full.. or whether that level has been reduced <-half or some extent emptied..

[-YYZ-]

Another way they could have written would have been as "10 millionths of a billionth of a billionth of a second", which is still damn awkward but at least reads correctly and I assume is what they meant.

[Daus]

That's what I was afraid of. :)

[Stonewall Jackson]

How about John Ringo's new book Through the Looking Glass, due out in June, where a black hole is accidentally created in a lab at the University of Central Florida, devastating a large portion of Orlando?

Check out the sample chapters at www.baen.com