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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/science/29collider.html

Two men [are] pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii. ... They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

...

Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

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Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

That doesn't sound like a no!

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Jim, weigh in on these whackos.

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"If it was anyone but Carp, I would have said, 'No,'" Matheny said. "Anyone but Carp."

This should clear the way for that bypass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet

the "dangers" part of this is awesome. I say full steam ahead.

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I think there are actually very small black holes created, so I guess technically they are right. It's not going to swallow up the universe though.

People freak out at this stuff, we have a heard of 70 bison roaming our campus and when the place first opened up they thought they were like the canaries being flown down into mine shafts. The truth is the founder was a naturalist, and wanted to turn the 6500 acres into a restored prarie.

People freak out about stuff they don't understand.

BTW - here are a couple of photos I took last March when I was visiting CERN. I was able to go on a tour down in the Atlas experiment. I watched as they hoisted a huge piece of machinery 100 meteres up through a tunnel, it was a little unnerving. The pictures just don't do it justice, it totally freaks me out that these things are so big yet are examining things so small. It was really an awe inspiring.

Hoisting the bobcat like machine 100 meters up:



The Atlas detector:










And here is a shot looking down 100 meters. This is where that machine was lifted through.

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"Boy, that was exciting. I always say it ain't over til it's over, but that one should've been over a while ago." ~ Yogi Berra

I'm pretty sure I just saw this in that Deja Vu movie with Denzel Washington. They use it to look back in time and zap pieces of paper into the past.

I realized I probably skimmed over stuff assuming things that nobody would know. The LHC is a ring, and at various points on the ring they actually do the collision of particles and collect the infomration. The pictures you see is the Atlas experiment - so it's at one of the points on the LHC ring where collisions take place and data collected.

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"Boy, that was exciting. I always say it ain't over til it's over, but that one should've been over a while ago." ~ Yogi Berra

And what exactly kind of information do we get out of doing this stuff? Is it really worth the 8 billions dollars spent on building the machine and also risking the end of the universe to get this info?

We don't have the power to end the universe, nor this galaxy, nor this corner of the galaxy. All that we could destroy is our own tiny planet.

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by a pack of angry chihuahuas, lets hope that is all it is...." -wart57
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