From Douglas Graham
douglas.graham@mcmail.com
Your article about Q-balls reveals that physicists at CERN in Geneva wish to
use large (1 gram) particles to induce proton decay and release large amounts of
energy (This Week, 30 August, p 18).
This does then seem to be a real supply of “limitless” energy. However, as
all of the particles in the Q-ball will be in the same quantum state (they have
no spin), the ball can be thought of as one particle and so will be about 10 000
times the Planck mass, meaning that it will instantly collapse into a small
black hole. This could lead to the sucking in of Switzerland and, hopefully,
France.
