More on the Large Hadron Collider

Fears of an impending apocalypse have prompted death threats to a group of scientists working on the most expensive non-military experiment ever attempted. Particle physicists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will on Wednesday throw the switch on the AUS$6.6 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The scientists at CERN will begin to shoot protons around a 27km ring-shaped tunnel at almost the speed of light. Within a few months they will smash the sub-atomic components into one another, generating temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the sun, but in a tiny space. The scientists hope to observe the conditions that existed in the aftermath of the Big Bang and possibly hunt down an elusive particle postulated in theoretical physics, known as the Higgs Boson. There's even a chance that the collisions could create mini black holes, which the scientists believe would quickly blink out of existence. And it's this potential for black holes that has critics of the project worried. Theoretical chemist Otto Rossler, from Germany's Tubingen University, lodged an emergency injunction with the European Court of Human Rights to prevent the LHC being turned on. Dr Rossler, who has been the experiment's foremost critic, and other signatories to the appeal said the LHC's potential to create life-sucking black holes violated the right to life under the European Convention of Human Rights. The court rejected Dr Rossler's appeal, but he still believes that a mini black hole could "eat the planet from the inside" within four years of forming. UK newspaper the Telegraph reported today that CERN scientists had received threatening telephone calls and e-mails. But team member Professor Brian Cox — once the keyboardist with pop group D:Ream — said the experiment posed no danger to the public. "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat," he told the Telegraph. The growing hysteria prompted CERN to publish a peer-reviewed report reiterating the LHC's safety. Scientists working on the project point out that cosmic rays from space slam into the earth's atmosphere, producing similar or greater collision energies to those that will be found in the LHC. These collisions happen all the time — yet mini black holes have not yet consumed the earth, CERN says. "The LHC safety review has shown that the LHC is perfectly safe,” Jos Engelen, CERN’s Chief Scientific Officer, said in a statement. "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.”