Will the Hadron Collider destroy the world ?

As Europe's CERN particle-physics center is counting down to the official startup of the Large Hadron Collider, a report reassuring the public that the world's largest atom-smasher won't destroy the world is getting a second wave of publicity. The report was prepared by CERN scientists and outside researchers and released in June, updating a 2003 safety study. Now the new study has been published by the peer-reviewed Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics. CERN used the occasion to emphasize the mainstream view that the collider won't create globe-gobbling black holes or other types of doomsday phenomena that have put folks on edge. "The LHC will enable us to study in detail what nature is doing all around us," CERN Director Robert Aymar said in today's news release. "The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction." The report concludes that if the collider could create catastrophes, the much more powerful particle collisions that continually occur in space would have wiped us out long ago. "It points out that nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programs on Earth - and the planet still exists," said Jos Engelen, CERN's chief scientific officer.

Critics of the collider weren't satisfied when the report first came out in June, and they're not likely to change their mind now that it's been formally published in the scientific literature. The hysteria over the LHC and black-hole boogeymen has been rising with the approach of next Wednesday's low-energy startup.

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