The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Once you go black...

A first-stage report of an experiment in high energy physics may have created an extremely short-lived, miniature black hole in a particle accelorator. At this point in the game it's all too ill-defined -- that's why scientists publish, so that others can tear into the experiment to find other explanations and similar facilities can try to reproduce the effect. Still, my first, blue-sky thought was whether or not two or more beams of highly-focused gold nuceli travelling at near-light speed might conceivably be used to produce a similar, larger, controlled effect capable of essentially snuffing out a nuclear explosion?

There's a great deal in that line of thought to go wrong, from the feasibility of even controlling such streams of nuclei over a long distance to the amount of energy required, to what sort of peripheral radiations one might expect if that much energy was being absorbed. I don't know if the radiant thermal energy described would be proportionately larger with the increased energy or not. Even if it was possible the thermal radiation might be as powerful as what it's trying to absorb; we might simply find ourselves irradiated by a different effect. Getting it just right could be the trick. Still, if the beams could be focused well they might act in the first stage as a particle beam weapon, striking a missile's warhead prior to detonation and destroying it, with the added effect of potentially "vacuuming up" the particles into... wherever things go/whatever things become when they contact a singularity.

As I said, it's all blue-sky thinking, and likely embarassingly easily shot full of holes anywhere along the line from the infeasibility of effectively targeting a charged particle stream over a distance due to electromagnetic fields pulling it this way and that, to exactly what's going on at the far end. The sheer energy, the sheer density of the particle stream required might be astronomical, or perhaps the effect witnessed in the accelorator is a quantum effect that doesn't "scale up" so to speak and work at such gross levels.

It's just fun to run with such things for a little while sometimes.