CERN fails to destroy the Earth!

Some fear the CERN laboratory could destroy the Earth

For anyone who thought that today would be the end of the world, they may have a little longer to wait. Several doomsayers had predicted that the CERN ‘atom-smasher’, which went into operation today, would create a cataclysmic black hole sucking up the entire Earth into a point of almost nothing. The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, at the CERN laboratory situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border, is a $6 billion project which sets out to study sub-atomic particles and, in particular, conditions that may have been occurring at the beginning of the universe. The LHC, a 27 km circular tunnel, will enable scientists to project sub-atomic particles at velocities close to the speed of light. As the facility was switched on today there was no ‘big-bang’ nor any black-holes coming into existence.

However, it is early days for the experimentation taking place in Geneva. Today was only a test run in the firing of sub-atomic particles along the tunnel in order to assess how fast scientists can make them go. The real experimentation comes in a few weeks as the first collision takes place. This has a small number of scientists concerned. One opponent, Otto Rössler, has even attempted to bring legal action to call a halt to the experiments. However attempts by the German chemist from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen have so far failed. Luis Sancho and Walter L. Wagner, independent astrophysicists based in Hawaii, have also failed in their attempt to stop CERN turning on the LHC.

Sancho and Wagner petitioned the U.S. District Court in Honolulu, Hawaii last spring to stop the progress of the LHC. In court files, the pair call the atom-smasher a "dark matter factory" that will spawn self-propelled bombs, "that is, substances, which actively attract and transform our normal matter and whose strength is such that once they become stable they cannot be controlled or destroyed by human beings - It is thus extremely dangerous to produce any quantities of strange matter or black holes on Earth."

But most scientists dismiss these theories. “Even if micro black holes formed, they would be smaller than protons—which fit in the nuclei of atoms—and would evaporate in a miniscule fraction of a second, long before they could grow by [absorbing] other matter," Jonathan Feng, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, told the National Geographic magazine. The fears by some has spawned not only several websites [lhcdefense.org / misunderstooduniverse.com] but also many lurid headlines, even in some of the more serious papers [Daily Telegraph].

But so far, there has been no major catastrophe and nor will there be according to one scientist, after whom the radiation said to destroy any potential black holes, was named.
“The world will not come to an end when the LHC is switched on” Stephen Hawkings told the BBC. But if any of the cynics are indeed correct, they will have less than 5 minutes to rejoice in saying “I told you so” as the Earth disappears into oblivion.