Consumed From the Inside Out
All I know about black holes is that they have zero volume and infinite density. They sit in deep space, trapping everything that comes near enough (crossing inside what’s known as the “Schwarzschild radius”) and letting nothing escape, even light.
    So I am perplexed. What happens if you create one in a laboratory?
     Melville says he believes it would be microscopic at first but would grow exponentially, eventually obliterating Earth. “The black hole would first eat its way down toward the center of Earth and consume from the inside out. It would not be a good time to be around to see this. In the end ALL of Earth would be consumed.”
     When I started looking into this, I was stunned to find that other physicists are speculating along the same lines as Melville. The July 1999 Scientific American contains letters debating the possibility Melville raises, and the July 18 Sunday Times of London reported on and editorialized against the experiment, which it considers frighteningly dangerous. So it’s not just paranoid physicists and rogue journalists concerned about the RHIC.
     Hoping to forestall the end of the world, I contacted Brookhaven immediately. “We certainly do not wish to destroy the earth,” sniffed spokeswoman Diane Greenberg, who clearly has been fielding plenty of questions like mine. Then she sent me a statement by Brookhaven Lab Director John Marburger, entitled “On Consequences of RHIC Operations.”
     “The amount of matter involved in the RHIC collisions is exceedingly small — only a single pair of nuclei is involved in each collision,” Marburger states. “Our universe would have to be extremely unstable in order for such a small amount of energy to cause a large effect. On the contrary, the universe appears to be quite stable against releases of much larger amounts of energy that occur in astrophysical processes.
     “RHIC collisions will be within the spectrum of energies encompassed by naturally occurring cosmic radiation. The earth and its companion objects in our solar system have survived billions of years of cosmic ray collisions with no evidence of the instabilities that have been the subject of speculation in connection with RHIC.”

Playing at God
Why am I not reassured by this? The short answer is that the experiment is conducted by human beings — the same folks who brought you the internal combustion engine, which threatens to destabilize the planet’s climate, and powerful antibiotics, which ultimately created an invincible staphylococcus bacterium. In other words, technopride goeth before the fall.
     The longer answer is that Melville’s scenario is perversely seductive in a Kubrickian sort of way. Think of Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are few things quite as persuasive as the vision of humans, their thirst for knowledge and progress insatiable, stumbling on a way to destroy the planet. It is an end-of-the-world scenario that has launched a thousand movie scripts.
     Human progress has always had a nasty habit of producing unintended consequences — usually because the prideful progenitors of progress insist on pooh-poohing any possibility of danger. Now, in recreating the beginning of the universe, we are essentially playing at being God — an unforgivable offense, punishable, as tragedians in the Bible and other literature have prophesied for centuries, by annihilation.