What a joke. I've had to endure these stupid headlines and TV programs for the last couple of years now.
Yes you guessed it about the Large Hadron Collider. The BBC led the pack with a false premise that a black hole could form and destroy the Earth - despite the fact that one of the scientists on the very program said that would not happen - but we'll just ignore what the expert says and make up our own BS.
National Geographic's headline reads:
Worst Case: Collider Spawns Planet-Devouring Black Hole
And how is it going to do that? Oh wait, it can't.
Most physicists respond that the collider is safe and even necessary for the advancement of humankind.
Of course its safe. The worst thing that could possibly happen is the magnets could break, and then they'd have to be replaced.
But what if they're wrong?
What if anything is wrong? What if we're living on a giant beach ball being tossed into a fire? What if we're really all living in the Matrix?
What if they're wrong... Lame attempt at making a story.
What exactly would happen if the 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel under pastoral France and Switzerland opened up a black hole—or black holes?
Well we'll just ignore the fact that it won't, and assume it will.
Absolutely nothing.
The trouble with a tiny weeny little black hole is it will evaporate instantly due to Hawking Radiation, it won't be maintained because it is so small nothing can fall into it, it won't effect anything around it because its gravity would be no greater than that of a proton or two. A proton hanging around is more dangerous, heck that can kill you with more than just gravity - it can come after you with gravity, the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force. Oh noes! Run for the hills.
I expect this kind of scaremongering-anti-scientific crap from the mainstream press, I don't expect it from National Geographic. Get real, let somebody who actually knows something do your science pieces from now on.
Other pet peeves:
1) Calling the LHC the Big Bang experiment - it does NOT recreate the Big Bang. It's just a particle accelerator, the top thing on its list of things to do is to find the Higgs boson, the last particle we haven't found yet that is predicted by the Standard Model.
2) Calling the Higgs boson the "God" particle.
3) Calling the 6 billion dollars spent on the experiment (over the last 15 years) a waste of money, go talk to the US government who spend 500 billion dollars per year on their military.
Good luck to those at CERN and the scientists who have been working on this project for most of their lives, hopefully today's tests will go without a hitch and it'll be up and running and returning data later this year.