Can We Make a Black Hole in a Lab? A Michigan State Physicist Weighs In

When you hear the phrase “black hole,” you probably picture a cosmic monster that devours everything, even light. It’s a dramatic image, but the physics behind it is surprisingly precise. A black hole’s gravity is so intense that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, meaning nothing – not even photons – can get out once they cross the event horizon.

Stephen Dikerby, a postdoctoral scholar at Michigan State University who studies the X‑ray and gamma‑ray universe, sat down with Local 4 Live to talk about a question that’s been buzzing in science circles for years: could we ever create a black hole in a laboratory?

“In theory, yes,” Dikerby says, chuckling. “If you squeeze enough mass or energy into a tiny volume, general relativity tells us a horizon would form.” In practice, the “enough” part is astronomically large – you’d need a concentration of energy far beyond anything we can produce with today’s technology.

That’s where particle accelerators come into the story. The Large Hadron Collider, for example, smashes protons together at near‑light speed, briefly creating conditions that mimic the early universe. Some speculative theories suggest that if extra dimensions exist, those collisions could generate microscopic black holes, sometimes called “micro‑black holes.”

But even if a micro‑black hole were born inside a collider, Stephen points out that Stephen Hawking’s famous prediction would kick in immediately. “Hawking radiation would cause it to evaporate in a fraction of a second – essentially faster than we could ever detect it,” he explains. The evaporation would release a burst of particles, but the total energy would be minuscule, comparable to a harmless sub‑atomic interaction.

Safety concerns have been raised by the public and some media outlets, but the consensus among physicists is clear: there’s no danger. The Earth itself is bombarded constantly by cosmic rays that carry energies far exceeding anything we can create in a lab, and those natural collisions have never produced a catastrophic black hole.

So, can we make a black hole in a lab? In the strictest sense, the answer is technically “yes,” but only a fleeting, microscopic one that disappears almost instantly. The pursuit isn’t about creating a cosmic menace; it’s about probing the edges of quantum gravity and testing fundamental physics.

For now, the notion of a runaway black hole eating up a city remains solidly in the realm of science‑fiction. What we do get, however, is a deeper glimpse into how the universe works at its most extreme scales – and that’s pretty exciting on its own.