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robertjford80
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this passage is from Paul Davies' the Last Three Minutes:
I have a very difficult time believing and understanding this. Why would two quarks being in close proximity create a black hole? A nucleus is only 3 orders of magnitude larger than a quark which i like mount everest compared to a human so i would think that quarks would approach each other a lot more often than 10^45 years. Second, when this black hole occurs, what happens to the neighboring protons? Just what is this black hole made of? Quarks?
From time to time, two quarks will approach each other very closely. Still more rarely, all three quarks will find themselves in extremely close proximity. It is possible that the quarks will get so close that the gravitational force between them, normally utterly negligible, will overwhelm all else. If this happens, the quarks will fall together to make a minuscule black hole. In effect, the proton collapses under its own gravity by quantum-mechanical tunneling. The resulting minihole is highly unstable—recall the Hawking process—and more or less instantly vanishes, creating a positron. Estimates of the lifetime for proton decay via this route are very uncertain, and vary from 10 to the 45 years to a stupendous 10 to the 220 years
I have a very difficult time believing and understanding this. Why would two quarks being in close proximity create a black hole? A nucleus is only 3 orders of magnitude larger than a quark which i like mount everest compared to a human so i would think that quarks would approach each other a lot more often than 10^45 years. Second, when this black hole occurs, what happens to the neighboring protons? Just what is this black hole made of? Quarks?