ZPEnergy.com - Black holes, zero point energy, and risks to Earth

Paul J. Werbos, Dr. writes: Good morning!

Many people on this list are excited by the positive possibilities for new technology. That's valid and important. Equally valid are the fears and risks being discussed on other lists.

We may be approaching a time when certain TYPES of experiment really should be performed somewhere other than the surface of earth, just as a reasonable precaution.

On the other list, many are discussing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction in Europe.

They argue that the risk is too high of creatng small black holes that would then gobble up the entire earth.

I have not taken a stand on that issue, in part because I do not really know ... would the LHC really have some chance of doing things that have not been done already, exactly the same way, in the earth's atmosphere dozens or thousands of times already? But still... there may be experiments possible that WOULD do new things...

and so, it is worth discussing... and thinking more about...

What would a small black hole do, if created?

Just to start the discussion..

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A lot of people have been very dogmatic about the belief that a small black hole would, of course, just evaporate quickly. The sheer religious enthusiasm of that belief -- and the Will to Defend -- should be a warning sign to those who have not looked further.

Let's look just a little further here.

Hawking has actually discussed many different ideas in his career, some more valid than others. (I would say the same about Einstein. Can one really agree with what he said about quantum theory, and what he said about the photon, at the same time?) This is not about personalities.

One of Hawking's ideas, popularized by Bob Forward and picked up as dogma by many others, is that small black holes must in fact be "white" -- must radiate away all of their energy quickly, because of the effect of quantum zero point energy.

Within the world of quantum gravity and cosmology, there is considerable empirically-based discussion of these issues. (For an example, google on "quintessence dark energy.") One idea is that the mysterious evidence of an unexpected degree of expansion in the universe can be explained by the presence of that quantum zero point energy as a source of gravitation. If zero point energy is there, one WOULD expect it to be a source of gravitation, one way or another.

The problem is that the observed gravitational effect... is many, many orders of magnitude less than what the usual zero point energy theory assumes.

This being so... why should we be so confident that the decay of a small black hole would be so rapid as what Hawking has suggested? If the actual decay rate is something like 10**-50 as fast as he suggests...

Someone on this list said something like: "New physics theory says they might produce a black hole. But new physics theory also says it will evaporate." But "new physics theory" is not a single thing. It's different theories, different terms in the equations...

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There is another way to look at this.

The "canonical" original version of quantum theory, described in texts like Mandl and Shaw (and in Weinberg), starts out by deriving a canonical Hamiltonian by plugging in... well, let me not elaborate here. After deriving that Hamiltonian, it notes some embarrassing terms of infinite energy. It argues that we can just throw those away, because we shouldn't expect them to have physical effects. After that... it is the reduced, "normal form Hamiltonian" which actually yields the high-precision predictions we have heard about for quantum electrodynamics. The normal form Hamiltonian has no zero point energy. At that level -- there is not really a good empirical reason to believe that the zero point energy is there at all. It is far from well established, at best.

Lots of people will then tell you "what about the Casimir effect?" The well-established Casimir effect, between parallel plates, does not provide any evidence whatsoever that zero point energy exists. It is exactly equal to the attraction one would have predicted long ago from simple well-known dipole-dipole interactions, as shown by Landau et al many many years ago. Some crazy enthusiasts have said: "we can debate how much of this attraction is due to dipole-dipole interactions, and how much to zero point energy." No, we can't. The magnitude of the Vanderwaals interactions is well established, and the measured Casimir effect is equal to it. The unexplained gap is unequivocally zero.

Rational supporters of zero point energy can say: "For the planar system, an improved zero point model predicts zero (or unmeasurably small) net effects above and beyond the usual Vanderwaals effects. But it does predict different, measurable effects in other situations." As I understand it, that is where the serious research on Casimir is now focused. What do these alternative models say about small black holes? I don't know, but my quick impression is that 10**-50 times the Hawking decay prediction may well be in the right ballpark.

But there are some aspects of these issues that no one has fully analyzed yet, and perhaps some of us ought to...

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Best of luck to us all,

Paul

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Again, there are some aspects I do need to re-examine here... traditional ways of thinking about time can confuse the issue of the magnitude and nature of "white noise" effects, and .. there are certain master equations that need to be revisited, also with Fokker-Planck replaced by Itoh, or rather forwards-backwards Itoh..