I felt the need to briefly comment on the supposed end of the world caused by the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN that started firing beams of accelerated particles today. It will not cause the end of the world. First, they are not even colliding particles until next month. You have at least a month to get your affairs in order… Second: the energies they will achieve are no different than what occurs, and has been occurring since time=0 for earth, in our upper atmosphere. High energy cosmic rays, which are essentially what the LHC will be colliding, collide with atoms in our upper atmosphere all the time. As we have not been swallowed by a black hole, or as all the matter on earth has not been changed to “strange matter” by strangelets, there is little too fear. The LHC will hopefully answer some critical questions in particle physics by investigating conditions that would have occurred in the fraction of time after the big bang. It is a really cool machine!
A brief comment for those perpetuating the hysteria around the start-up of this interesting scientific endeavor: Stop wasting all of our time and focus on something that is a real threat to annihilate the human race. Nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon proliferation. Go protest the needless presence of nuclear weapons on this planet. Take the Bush government to court to stop them from deploying a ballistic missile shield, which amounts to little more than a step backward in reducing the threat of nuclear war. Nuclear weapons are a million times more of a threat to our health and safety than the LHC is, so please, go fight something worthwhile, and let the physicists get some work done…
And if I am wrong, oh well… If one must die, swallowed by a black hole is a pretty cool way to go…
My $0.03
