Question: Is it possible to create a black hole on earth

Jose Eliel Camargo Molina answered on 2 Mar 2019: last edited 2 Mar 2019 1:40 pm

To add to Hannah’s great answer, to our best understanding of the particle world, the so-called Standard Model, it is not possible to create black holes in particle colliders like the LHC at CERN.

But wait! a big part of being a scientist is to allow for the unforeseen. So we seriously consider what is possible beyond what we have tested and trust today.

So, many theoretical physicists come up with new ideas for extensions that might explain things like dark matter which are not explained by the Standard Model.

In several of those new particle models, it would be possible to produce tiny black holes in particle collisions at the LHC.

This whole thing is very exciting for scientists as it means we have some work to do to explain things we know exist, like dark matter or the fact that neutrinos have mass, but we don’t yet know for sure how they work. But so far, we have not been able to show that any of those theories describe the way the particle world works, and no black holes have been produced at CERN.