EpiStack

A-29 - Stable black holes from cosmic rays would be charged, stop in Earth or Sun, and accumulate in billions - the absence of any effect excludes the scenario

2 min read

Properties8
type
argument
id
A-29
statement
Black holes born from colliding quarks would mostly be electrically charged, and a charged stable black hole produced by cosmic rays would be slowed and stopped by well-understood electromagnetic interactions inside the Earth or Sun despite its high initial velocity; billions would have accumulated over their lifetimes if the LHC could produce them, so the complete absence of macroscopic effects means they are not produced, are all neutral, or are harmless — and neutrality plus stability is itself nearly self-contradictory, since a hole traversing matter preferentially absorbs nucleons and charges up positively while the Schwinger neutralization mechanism stands or falls with Hawking radiation.
source
S-1 - LSAG report- Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions
locator
§4, ¶¶ 'Most black holes produced...' and 'If a black hole were to be produced by a cosmic ray...'
affects_observations
status
approved
reason_if_not_false
checked

Reasoning:

  1. LHC/cosmic-ray black holes originate from quark collisions, so generically carry electric charge; charged-particle stopping in matter is experimentally well understood, and even relativistic charged holes produced by cosmic rays stop inside Earth or the Sun. This closes the fast-vs-slow loophole of the cosmic-ray argument for the charged case: nature’s holes accumulate exactly where collider holes would.
  2. Billions of stopped, stable, accreting holes over 4.5 Gyr with zero macroscopic effect on Earth or Sun excludes the charged-stable-accreting combination empirically.
  3. The neutral escape hatch is squeezed theoretically: (a) traversing matter, a hole preferentially eats protons and neutrons (heavier than electrons), so it develops and maintains positive charge even if born neutral; (b) the standard neutralization channel — Schwinger pair creation at the horizon — rests on principles very similar to Hawking radiation, so a scenario that suppresses Hawking radiation to keep the hole stable likely suppresses neutralization too. Combining stable + neutral + accreting therefore requires yet further deviations from basic physical laws, with no known consistent microphysics exhibiting all of them; and even then the Giddings-Mangano accretion bounds close the remainder.

Validity verdict (step 6)

Reconstruction: premises = quark-born holes generically charged; EM stopping of charged particles well understood and sufficient to stop them in Earth/Sun; cosmic-ray production copious if LHC production is possible. Conclusion is properly disjunctive (not produced / all neutral / harmless), so the inference from absence-of-effects is valid conditional on the premises - whether stopping actually succeeds at cosmic-ray boosts is premise-truth for step 8. The neutrality squeeze is a coherent two-pronged evidential step (preferential nucleon capture charges the hole positive; Schwinger neutralization stands or falls with the same physics as Hawking radiation) and is hedged as “nearly self-contradictory” rather than claimed as a theorem. Checked.

Graph View

Show model graphinteractive Bayesian view — separate from the graph above
added after the FLF submission deadline

Backlinks