Will The World End On September 10th?

Here’s a story from the SUN:

Scientists are trying to stop the most powerful experiment ever – saying the black holes it will create could destroy the world. Dubbed by some the Doomsday test, it will be carried out next week in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located 300ft underground near the French-Swiss border. The machine is 17 miles long and cost £4.4billion to create.

When its switch is pulled on September 10, this atom-smasher will become a virtual time machine, revealing what happened when the universe came into existence 14 billion years ago. New particles of matter are expected to be discovered, new dimensions found beyond the four known, as scientists re-create conditions in the first BILLIONTHS of a second after the Big Bang.

The group responsible for the experiment, the European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN), says that these mini black holes will vanish as quickly as they are created. But the anti-CERN brigade accuse the scientists of playing God, warning that no one can guarantee that the black holes will not survive, rapidly growing in size to suck the Earth out of existence in an instant.

From the collisions, boffins expect to discover a fundamental bit of the atom, called the Higgs boson, that is expected to exist but which has never been seen.

Here’s a great video about it from Brian Cox.

Here’s what some people are afraid might happen:

We think that if the earth is sucked into a black hole, it would be cooler if loud drum’n'bass music was played.

Also, you should hold off paying your mortgage for a few days until after the event. As our good friend Jeff says: If the LHC is going to warp the condo off to ancient rome, what’s the point?

Cracked has this cool page about the 5 experiments most likely to end the world.

Remember to mark your calendars: LHC First Beam on Sep 10, 2008.