by Tenebris

Created on: April 29, 2009   Last Updated: June 06, 2009

"Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on."
- LHC project leader Lyn Evans

Soon CERN will switch on the Large Hadron Collider again after having repaired the recent helium leak - or, more accurately, bump up the experiments which had already been going on for some time before the helium leak was discovered. Odds are very good that the powering up and initial experiments at full power will go without visible incident, and may continue going without visible incident for some time.

And people will point to these immediate results and laugh at those who had shown concern, saying: "See? We told you nothing bad would happen!"

Which, ironically, is much the same thing roughly 90% of the physicists involved have been saying, based on exactly the same amount and type of evidence, telling us again and again that there is "no basis for any conceivable threat." Oh, it could definitely create a tiny black hole or two - yes, the CERN scientists themselves acknowledge this falls within fairly likely possibilities - but Hawking radiation means it would evaporate almost at once. Of course, new findings are challenging whether Hawking radiation actually exists, but again, that is what the LHC is there to find out.

Should it so happen that Hawking, like so many physicists before him, did not have the full picture, an LHC black hole just might be stable. It also won't be travelling very fast, so it would have a high chance of being captured by the earth. In this case, it would oscillate a few times all the way through the earth and back, eating up tiny amounts of matter each time, until eventually it comes to rest somewhere near the core. The problem is not what is absorbed into the black hole during those original oscillations, nor any shift in gravity, but that since it would remain within the earth, it would quietly keep on absorbing matter and growing. For some months we would notice nothing at all, although maybe a few fine instruments might notice tiny changes in the planet's rotation, similar to the change observed after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. In somewhere between one and four years, the effects would suddenly become noticeable as a serious instability within the earth's core - after which it would only be a matter of hours before the earth ceases to exist as a planet.

It is more likely that the LHC could also produce the theoretical particles known as strangelets, speculated to be among the major components of the universe's 'dark matter'. While

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