New Scientist Black holes, but not as we know them - Features

New Scientist Black holes, but not as we know them - Features: "Baby black holes
You don't have to go to space to find a black hole: mini versions could be created to order, right here on Earth. That's what some physicists claim will be possible using the world's most powerful particle accelerator, due to turn on in 2007.
Currently under construction at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider will smash protons together with a collision energy of 14,000 billion electronvolts. This might just be enough to create several black holes every second, provided some strange ideas about unknown physics turn out to be right. Each mini wonder would weigh no more than a few micrograms and be smaller than a speck of dust.
A black hole is thought to form when the core of a massive star collapses under its own weight and is crushed to a point. Vast amounts of matter weighing more than a few suns are needed to produce gravity strong enough for this to happen.
Yet the special theory of relativity gives a clue to making black holes in the laboratory. Einstein used the theory to show that energy is equivalent to matter. So black holes should also pop into existence when vast amounts of energy are concentrated into a point, and that's exactly what happens when particles smash together at extreme energies.
But there's a snag. According to our existing knowledge of particles and the forces that operate between them, the minimum energy needed to make a black hole this way is 10 million billion times more than LHC can produce. And the chances of ever building a particle accelerator that can reach such energies are virtually nil.
In the past few years though, the prospects for making black holes in the lab have improved. This is down to a theory that says gravity is actually much stronger than we think. Huge masses are needed for the force of g"