The uber-nerds in charge of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle smasher, insist that when their big new shiny toy is turned on later this year it will not - I repeat not - result in the total destruction of the earth.
"The LHC will start up this year, and it will produce all sorts of exciting new physics and knowledge about the universe," said CERN spokesman James Gillies. "A year from now, the world will still be here."
These reassurances probably won't quiet the small but vocal group of wackos who have raised concerns over the LHC and its possible deleterious effects on the space-time continuum.
The wackos have gone so far as to sue CERN, citing the potential for numerous exotic and disastrous phenomena to be created by the LHC's operation. Among these doomsday possibilities are tiny black holes that could grow to swallow the earth, killer strangelets that would begin devouring atomic nuclei until there was nothing left of earth or proton-destroying magnetic monopoles.
A safety review, undertaken in 2003, conceded the slight possibility that tiny black holes or magnetic monopoles could result from work at the LHC, but said there was no chance of these phenomena endangering the planet or humanity.
The LHC is expected to be a major boon to science when it finally begins functioning in a few months. Questions physicists hope to answer with it include whether the Higgs mechanism exists, whether particles have supersymmetric partners and why gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces.
And it will also make a mean omelet (one that will absolutely not expand and cover the earth in eggy goop...probably).
