Tom Kerwick challenged my warnings by claiming that the observed longevity of white dwarfs, in spite of the constant bombardment by cosmic rays, provides a convincing safety argument regarding the currently running nuclear collisions experiment at CERN. This claim is important but, unfortunately, inconclusive as I shall try to demonstrate.
It is true that the collisions performed at CERN are relatively meager compared to cosmic-ray energies. The current, approximately 10 TeV collisions between equal-momentum particles at CERN correspond to 10.000 TeV cosmic ray protons hitting a stationary proton on earth or a white dwarf. The thousand-fold increase is a consequence of the relativistic energy-momentum law being applicable.
If 10.000 TeV (= 10 to the 16 electron volt) look like much, cosmic ray energies up to 10 to the 22 electron volt (a million times more) have been measured. However, if the latter are translated back into symmetric collisions of the CERN type, they are “only” a thousand times more energetic than CERN’s (owing to the square-root rule implicit in the mentioned law).
The fact that white dwarfs appear to be resilient to this bombardment is living proof that the cross section of CERN-generated miniature black holes (as well as their up to a thousand times more massive cosmic-ray generated analogs) must be minuscule. Specifically, their diameter must lie below that of a lepton (electron or quark). While an electron’s diameter is often supposed to be zero, neutrino absorption in solid matter yields a finite value (about ten to the negative 24 meter). In addition, the Telemach theorem guarantees a non-zero electron diameter.
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