Doomsday!!!

I _think_ gravity bends space, which alters the flow of time. It also bends light, but I believe that's unrelated. Ya want a better answer, you'll have to wait until Monday when I can prod someone who did more than first year physics at uni.

I think we shouldn't ponder it too much. Super volcanoes, asteroids, blackholes, sun flares and all that. Or maybe we should?

When one of the voyager (think it was voyager) satelites left our solar system it turned back inward facing to photograph it all, the photos were spread out 12foot in width on a wall to capture it all, our little planet just about made a tiny blue pixel (don't know what the resolution was). I don't feel safe anymore

No problem, nini balck holes are all over the place anyway.

Yep, there was one in Tesco's yesterday. It was on the baked beans shelf, I reached into get a tin and it just vanished, in front of my eyes. I felt my hand being drawn in but snatched it back quickly and all was well, although my fingernails had stretched to twice their previous length, so lucky escape. I complained to the Manager, he said it was not company policy to monitor mini black holes although if a full sized one entered the store they would review the situation, but he offered me some free nail clippers as compensation, so got a result .

Same thing happened to me last Thursday, followed by the Tuesday before. *pause* I hate it when time gets all misshapen.

Edit: On which note, no-one panic too much, it looks like the whole thing may be shut down by the future anyway: FQXi Community: Articles, Forums, Blogs, News - take THAT causality!

What, like trading accounts? How are mini black holes everywhere, this isn't going down the porn route is it?

Did you know, that if you could scale down our galaxy to A4 size it would be thinner than the piece of paper?

FYI

The effect of being sucked into a black hole is known as "spaghettification".

"Normal" physics breaks down when things are going really, really fast. The crux is that, say, a 30s timer will go for longer when it ocurs on a body in motion, relative to the observer, than when stationary.

A simple example:

When particles called Muons are created on the earths atmoshpere (about 6k's up from other particles arriving from the sun), they can be expected to "survive" about 2 millionths of a second. If they are moving at close to the speed of light (300 million meteres per second), they should get about 600 meteres before they disappear - yet they make it all the 6000m or so down to the earths surface - because, relative to the earths surface, time is passing slower.

If you measure time as if you were sat on the Muon, the same 2 millions of a second would last 31.6 millionths of a second down here on earth - enough time for the muons to go nearly 10km, rather than the 600m or so. It's known as Length contraction and time dilation, and happens at, and near, black holes.

Google the "twin paradox" for another example of this, pretty cool stuff.

CERN Press Release – CERN announces start-up date for LHC

I thought that mini-black holes are so unstable. That they won't last long enough to do damage. But yeah, all they're trying to do is find where the "missing energy" has gone from colliding particles. Not sure if this is the hadron particle... or the gravitron. I almost got that edinburger doctor to my high school a few years ago after he retired from edinburgh uni. He was busy at the time =/