[Zorland]

In what I expect will be a useless attempt to get people to stop bothering me about black holes, I would like to explain a bit about forces, black holes, and CERN.

*Gravity is a very weak force. You might not have realized this because the common conception is that gravity is a "law of nature we can't break"; you can't fly off the Earth, thus gravity is super duper strong. Well, this is not really true. I will quote a number for you, and then give a real life example. There are four (depending on how you count) basic types of forces that we know about. Gravity is the weakest. Another commonly know force is the electromagnetic force (electricity from the wall, magnetism from a magnet, etc). The electromagnetic force is 10^39 times stronger than gravity. That's the same ratio as the mass of the sun to the mass of 1 grain of salt.

"Bah, numbers!" you say. "Who cares about them!" Well consider this: There's probably a book within reach of you right now. Try to pick up the book. Did it work? Do you realize you just overcame the gravitation force of *the entire earth* with just a small bit of electromagnetic force (you probably can't even tell that your hands have electric charge at all). Gravity is very very weak. It only seems strong because you can lump a bunch of mass together a lot easier than you can lump a bunch of charge together.

*The gravitation (=force of gravity from a specific object) of an object is not affected by its shape. Think of the sun. It's a big sphere of some size. If we imagine shrinking the sun down to half its size, then the force on the earth from the sun would be exactly the same. If we expanded the sun to be twice as large, the force on the earth from the sun would be exactly the same. If somehow (and it's impossible as far as we know) the sun suddenly became a black hole, the force on the earth from the black hole sun (hehe) would be exactly the same.

Likewise, the gravitation of two protons on the rest of the earth is quite small. It doesn't matter how much you squish them together. In fact, if you packed those protons so tightly that they became a black hole, you could hold that black hole in your hand, since the gravitation <<< electromagnetic repulsion.

*Black holes have a certain density. That is, a certain amount of mass per volume. You can equally think of this as a certain energy per volume (e=mcc). The reason some people claim black holes will be formed at CERN is because we are smashing a lot of energy into a small space. (Even though the science does not support the conclusion of creating the black holes). However, with what you have just learned, you should feel safe in knowing that even if such a black hole were to be created, it could make no trouble. In fact, it would just evaporate in less than a second.

Rest easy,
Z