Is the Large Hadron Collider going to destroy the world?

No. As Brian Cox—formerly the keyboardist with pop band D:Ream and now a professor at the University of Manchester—put it eloquently last year, ‘anyone who thinks the LHC is going to destroy the world is a twat’. Despite this and many other assurances to the contrary from the scientific community, some people still think it might. One group, which included a few scientists (but no particle physicists), lodged a lawsuit at the European Court of Human Rights in September 2008, claiming that CERN had not properly considered the danger to human life that the experiment posed. They feared that the collisions in the LHC could create a microscopic black hole which would grow uncontrollably and suck the earth inside out within four years. Earlier in the year two Americans pursued a similar claim at a federal court in Hawaii, worrying not only about black holes but also about the possibility of the LHC emitting ‘strangelets’, hypothetical objects made of up, down and strange quarks which might turn the entire planet into a dense lump of homogenous ‘strange matter’. Both of these lawsuits were dismissed.

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