Stupid question about black holes/nuclear weapons.

[cosmicalstorm]

I know too little about physics to figure this out and I could'nt find anything in google due to the popularity of the terms black hole and nuclear weapon.
Anyway, my question is simple; Would it be possible to compress a sphere of matter to a point where it created a singularity by using nuclear weapons?
And im not talking about some impossibly large contraption here, (i.e. millions of tons of matter and a thousands of teraton bombs) but something that could actually be built within the budgets of our current society.

I suspect of course that the answer is no, but im just a bit curious as to why not since from what I gather nuclear weapons do during the first 0.0001 second or so after the detonation create immense pressures and heatlevels.

[Zixinus]

My first guess is that I doubt a warhead would have an efficient enough mechanism to compress the required matter into the sufficient density.

The energy needed for matter to reach black-hole level density is likely far greater than what nuclear fusion would require. You would need to compress atoms into neutrons and then compress it even further to get somewhere where a black hole is at.

[Sriad]

(warning, wikipedia science happening in this post!!)

No. Current particle accelerators (the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) are flirting with the energy levels needed to make quantum black holes (or at least energy events similar to what we would expect to see in the final femtosecond of a quantum black hole's decay; the RHIC stirred up the same fears from the same people as the LHC has more recently) by smashing gold nuclei directly into one another at ~.99999c, give or take a few 9s.

The energy involved in these collisions is on the order of 200 GeV.

Consider the following energies, expressed in Electron Volts:

*210 MeV: average energy released in fission of one Pu-239 atom.
*200 MeV: total energy released in nuclear fission of one U-235 atom (on average; depends on the precise break up); this is 82 terajoules per kilogram, or twenty thousand tonnes of TNT equivalent per kilogram.
*17.6 MeV: total energy released in fusion of deuterium and tritium to form helium-4 (also on average); this is 0.41 PJ/kg of product produced.
*13.6 eV: energy required to ionize atomic hydrogen. Molecular bond energies are on the order of an eV per molecule.
*1/40 eV: the thermal energy at room temperature. A single molecule in the air has an average kinetic energy 3/80 eV.

So you would need to (strictly by coincidence; on the atomic level a nuke going off is extremely chaotic) have 20% of the fission energy of 5000 fissioning atoms dumped into ONE target atom, just to produce a quantum black hole that lasts a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

[Sriad]

Ghetto edit: Another more intuitive but less strictly correct way of looking at it is converting electron volts to degrees Kelvin, 1eV to 11,604K. In the heart of an H-bomb the average temperature, by the above numbers, must be lower than 204 billion degrees Kelvin. (in real world nukes it's closer to 1/1000 that; the highest temperatures achieved in macroscopic man-made devices is ~3.7 billion K in the Z Machine) The temperature we'd associate with the energies required to compress matter into a black hole would be ~2.3 quadrillion K on an atomic level. If you're compressing more the temperature is less, but not by such a degree that it becomes feasible.

I'll work out some numbers to describe the pressure of nuclear weapons and what is needed for black hole collapse later tonight if one of our more natively math and physics savvy posters doesn't get to it first.

[Wyrm]

If you extract all the iron from the nukes and gather all of it together in a >3 solar-mass lump, they will naturally undergo gravitational collapse and form a black hole.

Otherwise, no. The kind of pressure you'd need to compress to the black hole is greater than the neutron degeneracy pressure. This degeneracy pressure can get up to 1/3 the energy density of the neutron gas (this includes mass). At best, nuclear reactions top out at about 0.3% efficiency by mass, so you get pressures no more than 0.3% the energy density.

[cosmicalstorm]

Thanks for clearing this up, I figured that it wasn't possible but I knew next to nothing about those specific details.