The Large Hadron Collider will not eat the world

Brian Angliss
Scholars & Rogues
Tuesday, June 24, 2008

There are a lot of people worried that the world will end soon. This autumn, specifically, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland and France turns on and starts smashing protons together at velocities that are nearly the speed of light. The main concern is that these collisions will create a miniature black hole that will swallow the Earth and us with it.

Thankfully for human civilization, black holes just don’t work this way.

While the basic level of understanding of science in the United States should be much higher than it is, the science underlying black holes is pretty arcane. While everyone really should remember the basic biology, physics, cosmology, geology, chemistry, ecology, and even genetics that they were taught in high school and maybe college (alas, science is too “nerdy” or “geeky” for most to care, never mind that footballs follow a predictable ballistic trajectory determined by Newton’s Laws of Motion), the science of black holes is strange enough that it’s simply not fair to expect everyone to have much knowledge of them beyond the fact that they exist.
Understanding why a LHC-created mini black hole won’t eat the planet requires a basic understanding of how black holes work, some of the weirder things they can do, and why those weird things mean that we don’t need to worry about a mini black hole eating the planet.
FULL ARTICLE @ Scholars & Rogues