"What will happen to me if I get sucked into a black hole?" you ask. "Will it hurt? Will it be cold? Hot? How should I dress? Should I pack a lunch? Will my cell phone work in a black hole?"
For answers, we turned to the Berkeley Cosmology Group, a group of theorists from the Departments of Physics and Astronomy at UC Berkeley, Space Sciences Lab and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Here's what they had to say:
"At first, you don't feel any gravitational forces at all. Since you're in free fall, every part of your body is being pulled in the same way, and so you feel weightless. As you get closer and closer to the center of the hole, though, you start to feel 'tidal' gravitational forces. Imagine that your feet are closer to the center than your head. The gravitational pull gets stronger as you get closer to the center of the hole, so your feet feel a stronger pull than your head does. As a result you feel 'stretched' like a piece of spaghetti. These tidal forces get more and more intense as you get closer to the center, and eventually they will rip you apart."
DON'T RELAX YET - THE PRICE OF FREEDOM IS ETERNAL VIGILANCE (not that it's going to do you any good.)
"Whew. So the startup of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland didn't create a black hole that would cause the planet to disappear. We can all breathe easy now, right? Uhhh, not so fast, Chester. One of the theories about the collider is that we wouldn't disappear in an instant. In fact, there would be no sign of trouble for a month or more. Then earthquakes would start happening in random places not near any fault lines. After a few days, these seismic disturbances would reach catastrophic proportions. Cities would be leveled, the oceans would rise and wash in a series of mega-tsunamis that would attack the world's coasts, killing millions. Then the Earth would literally start to crack up. Molten lava would wash over the land and the seas would start to boil. And then, finally, a disintegrating Earth would be sucked into the black hole. But hey, it's only a theory. So let's all calm down and remember that everything went according to plan the other night when they turned the thing on, right? Why, just listen to what Lyn Evans, who oversaw the building of the accelerator, said:
"Things can go wrong at any time, but luckily this morning everything went smoothly."
"Uhh, OK.
"Wait, how about this quote from Verena Kain, a European Organization for Nuclear Research engineer, who was there:
"Oh, wow, it actually worked!"
Source
SO YOU'RE GOING TO GET SUCKED INTO A BLACK HOLE
