This is the same kind of fright propagated when an atomic chain reaction was first contemplated. I recall a sience fiction story on radio with a thrill factor that included the possibility of a chain reaction of all existing minerals that destroyed the entire world, started by an atomic weapon.  

Of course, the same thing was said of the first iron plow. Fear mongers said it would poison the earth and render all soil useless for growing food and other crops.  I have a hunch that most of those detractors, at least the ones behind its genesis, were manufacturers of wooden plows, which were the norm at the time.

Keith

There was a show on National Geographic channel that dramatized this scenario (along with 3 other doomsday scenarios) called "End Day" ...

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/
channel/endday/blackhole.html

It was entertaining. I mean, who doesn't enjoy watching fairly realistic CG created scenes of massive destruction?

It is human nature to fear the unknown. Creationists fear that this may provide substantial evidence against their theories. Big Bang theorists fear that this may give credence to the creationist view. Thus they both fear finding the truth and base this fear upon the possibilities of possibilities of a freak result. I think that the search for the truth is noble. I just hope and pray that these scientists are not trying to play God and are not attempting to rush this experiment.

How much can society do to save us from future terror attacks?

I look around and I see a society that is completely unprepared for anything but a storybook life of summer barbeques and Sunday football.   It's as if by making contingency plans or taking precautionary measures a person is challenging the very justification for the entire society's accepted way of life, rather than stepping in line and keeping quiet.  We live more to impress the Jones’ next door than to actually get more out of life or to secure our families.  Few people even have a garden these days let alone a basic survival kit, an economic car, or alternative solar or wind power.  It’s unfathomable how much we’ve pretended doesn't exist or believe “could never happen to us!”  We literally are an accident waiting to happen - likely to die off from our own stupidity long before some terrorist has had a chance to blow us up!

When I look at all of the potential problems we face, the first thing I think of is that age old adage “safety in numbers.”  If something really severe was to happen, I’d want to have a place where my family and friends can stay securely.  I feel, all homes should be designed with larger bedrooms (each with its own two-person wardrobe room), separate bunk bed visitors’ rooms for times of mass evacuations, rooftop greenhouses, and rainwater holding tanks.  It’s simple, but why even stop there?  Can larger commercial-quality homes be built that can weather the roughest storms, the worst economic downturns, and allow an even larger group of family and friends to stand shoulder-to-shoulder regardless of what happens down the line?  Sure, they are called “communal homes” and regardless of past experiances they can help address a majority of the potential disaster scenarios we face (man-made or otherwise).  

It is a simple fact that more people with more talents can be more self-sufficient and more secure!  Self-sufficiency insulates us from region-wide disasters of all types.  Working from home in sub-industrial-scale shops and professionally equipped offices (which a larger group - living more efficiently - can more easily afford), can insulate us from high energy prices, corporate downsizing, and the need for so many cars!  

In the end, why live in a Barby Dollhouse only meant for decorating, when we can live in a high capaicty, fully functional home with TEN TIMES the performance and efficiency of suburban households?  

Just think.  If no one would have mentioned it, we all would have died in the blink of an eye and not have been the wiser for it.  So gentlemen, please keep this crap to yourself. Thank you very much.

No city ever survived by simply building a thicker or higher wall. Such walls were necessary, but ultimately, the city must have a fighting force that could take the war out to the enemy and the political will to use that force.

Xraying every piece of luggage, searching every purse, background checks to purchace a plane ticket is not living in peace.  History tells use that only those people who are willing to make the peace will have peace.

Was it Franklin who said that those who desire both freedom and security deserve neither?  Beware giving power to anyone who offers security and asks for more power and authority (guess who?).

Let's look at the actual probabilities and as the Scots say - If ye dinna fash yursel, ye'd nay hae problems!  You could get killed by a meteor in your bed, but how many have?

In fact, the Laws of Murphy control the effects of the Universe upon us.  Just because you aren't paranoid, doesn't mean that the Random Factor isn't out to get you!

"How much can society do to save us from future terror attacks?"

The word that is missing is "ourselves."  Here is seems that "us" is separate from "society."  It's like saying WE are not responsible for our safety, but SOCIETY is responsible for our safety.  Probably just a typo, but I thought the concept should be clarified: we are responsible for ourselves, on an individual basis and on a group basis.  Any delegation of that responsibility, or commutation of fault that the responsibility is not fulfulled, is unwise at best.

Be safe.  Yeah, you.  Yeah, and me, too.

Mini Black-Holes, COOL! :)

My only hope is that this effort will not turn out like children playing with matches.

Actually there is a way to prove black holes decay - its called logic.  If black holes never decayed, they would just keep growing and growing and the milky way would have already been destroyed by the big one at its center.

Lets see:  I can either A.)waaaay outlive my original, God-given lifespan by taking numerous drugs, hooking myself to life-stretching technology and die a withered old prune at 520; B.)die in a horrible auto-mobile accident, C.) be obliterated by nukes, D.)gassed by muslim extremists, or E.) be sucked into a reality bending mini-blackhole like something out of the Sci-Fi I've read all my life.  I choose E.  Bring it on!

fear of the unknown. humans have a an inbuilt fear of the unknown. if atall there is annihilation it is only for the body. the real you always lives. there is no death for the self/soul.we all will be born again as per our good and bad deeds done here.

There are occasional cosmic rays that strike the Earth, which are of vastly greater energy than the particles made in the most power acclerators.  And the Earth is still here after 5 billion years of that bombardment.

For the supercollider issue:  Yeesh...  Doomsayers for every device, I tell you.

Against future terrorist attacks:  Get used to them, they will happen again.  No defense is ever perfect. Be vigilant in a passive sense, knowing what to do if something happened, but don't spend the rest of your life in seige mode.  That's as much of a win as a successful terrorist attack.

For the shuttle:  Beautiful launch, good to see them going up regularly again.  Night launches shouldn't be an issue as long as the visibility requirements are rigidly observed.  That being said, daylight launches tend to be a lot prettier.

I'll miss them when they're retired, but it will be nice when Orion gives us a reasonably rugged vehicle without the material science and launch headaches.

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about small black holes... I think that (also) a "small" black hole doesn't have any reason to decay until it has sufficient matter to eat within its gravitational range... then...

about ESAS missions to Mars... despite NASA claim that the ESAS hardware will be used for a future Mars mission, I think it's sufficient ONLY for Moon missions while "Mars" needs hardware an order of magnitude better and most advanced than Ares and Orion (for Mars mission they look like use a bicycle to run the Indy race...). Mars missions absolutely NEED (also) a powerful nuclear rocket engine (and small nuclear power plants) that NASA must start to develop in the next 20 years if they want to have some working and reliable units after 2020... but, since NASA doesn't have (nor has planned) any research about them, ALL claims about Mars missions can't be true, and the planned ESAS missions to the red planet are only dreams!

about Ares rockets... despite the Ares rockets still plan to use some new engines and a REUSABLE 5-segments SRB, I insist to suggest (as explained in detail in my www.ghostNASA.com blog) TWO way to save GIANT amount of time and money:

1. use ONLY ready available engines

2. use ONLY expendable SRBs

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As long as they don't try to determine the precise mass of the Higgs boson, we'll be fine.

The inevitable curiousity of man has led to many great discoveries...how could we deny one more?  But, if ever primeval man poked animals with sticks in order to determine if they were dangerous, it would be inevitable that quite a few would die from this exploration.  I have a feeling that by carelessly using scientific advances without KNOWING, absolutely KNOWING the consequences, we're being set up to cause an unprecedented reaction, and there's a very high chance that reaction will be disastrous.

In an attempt to look beyond some of the more mentioned aspects of this blog, I would like to ponder the origin of our elusive friend..gravity.
Additionally, I would love to exchange theories with any of the more serious "parascientists" on this subject.I don't know about you, but it seems ridiculous that we can't seem to nail this down!
I do though, have some interesting aspects to explore.

John from Bloomington thinks creationists fear these experiments because they might provide "evidence against" creationism. We do not fear learning more about the physical universe. The knowledge gleaned from these experiments about subatomic particles and properties which operate in the present will not "prove" anything about what happened in the unobservable, unrepeatable past. Any new knowledge will be interpreted by "Big Bang" advocates in accordance with their prior philosophical assumptions, just as creationists will interpret it in accordance with our prior philosophical assumptions. Note that Ron Linveh, quoted in Alan's post, already assumes that the Big Bang happened, and assumes that these collisions are giving insight into its early moments. I simply make different assumptions: God created, and these collision may give addtional insight into the nature of His creation. My particular faith also tells me that this is not how the earth is to be destroyed, so I don't even have to fear that. Let 'er rip!

The force of gravity is extremely weak, at the microscopic scale.  Should a microscopic black hole be created and NOT decay why should we even worry?  The entire mass of a star colapsing into a singularity is one thing,  but a subatomic particle or 2? Imagine the time it would take to have any sort of effect on anything around it.

Didn't Nostradamous predict the end of the world about the time the "mini black-hole machine" is to be fired up?

The problem with Doomsayers is they only have to be right once. Could they be right about this? Not likely. To say that the energies generated around black holes, or that high-energy gama-rays colliding with atoms in the upper atmosphere earth dwarf the energies of anything we can accelerate on the ground is a vast understatement. The universe has not come to an end. You can’t allow irrational fears to rule you or all progress will come to an end. Yes the unknown is scary, but the only cure is to learn more.. We never would have gone to the moon if we listened to the Doomsayers who feared that we would ‘puncture’ the bubble of air that surrounds earth. It really gets that silly folks. What would happen if a mini-black hole hit the earth? Nothing. It would pass through the earth as though through a fog, as though the earth were not there. It might gobble a stray atom along the path, but Hawking radiation would evaporate a mini-black hole before it went very far. It would vanish  in short order with a burst of radiation.  But you can't get more out of a box than was put into it. If the energy used in creating a mini-black hole did not destroy the earth, then neither will the radiation of it's evaporation. How certain can we be that the Doomsayers are wrong? As certain as we can be about anything. As certain as the law of the conservation of energy. That's how certain. So, shall we be cowed by hysterical, irrational fears; or do we let the physicists to get on with their job of figuring out how this grand universe of ours works on the most fundamental level? A particle accelerator is a micro-scope into the infinitesimal. So Buck Up! Let’s see what we can see. -Science_1

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there are two differences between a "cosmic" mini-black-hole and a small-black-hole "built" in a particles' collider:

1. we have no evidence (so far) of any "cosmic-mini-black-hole" that has hit the Earth, then, we don't know (nor can EXACTLY predict) its effect (while the collider's black hole will be REAL)

2. a (possible) cosmic-mini-black-hole may pass through (or near) our planet at a VERY HIGH SPEED without have the time to "eat" so much, while, the collider's mini-black-hole will be stable in the collision chamber and its first "food to eat" will be part of the high energy particles used to create it...

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Subatomic machine that can destroy a planet....
Don't we already have something similar?
Thermonuclear weapons.

I hope today's children heed the lessons of the cold war without a suicidal learning curve.

If today's physicsts knew what was going to happen at the projected energies of the Hadron Collider, there would be little reason to try.  
To say confidently, "Nothing catastrophic could happen" is as bad as saying, "Something catastrophic will happen."

How about, "Don't know what will happen for sure, we'll start slow, but just-in-case, you better stand back!"

Forget the Higgs boson.  As long as they don't discover exactly what the universe is for and why it's here, we'll be fine.  Unless of course, that's already happened.  ;)

Go on all you want about people fearing the unknown. Any time you decide to make things explode - no matter how small you plan the explosions to be - you need to seriously consider how necessary it is. Add tiny black holes to the mix and...
Then again if it's a choice between getting sucked into a little black hole or getting blown up by an inoccuous-looking pile of garbage in some foreign desert, I like the black hole.

Pity any mini blackhole would decay too quickly to really study. But it will be nice to prove if they really exist or not.

THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!

Not that I really fear the thought of being sucked into the mini black holes of the LHC...  What has be a bit concerned is that science is getting to the point that it is starting to mess with some seriously dangerous concepts, and there is little or no concern about catastrophic civilization-ending accidents.  The fact that the world didn't blow up when the first atomic reactions were performed just means that the threshold before total Earth destruction was just a bit farther away than previously thought... not that it doesn't exist at all.

By no means should we block scientific experimentation because something bad might happen, as public outrage has in the distant and not-so-distant past (shuttle flights...), but let's merely be aware of what we are doing at all times and be mindful of how it might affect the rest of us.

Higgs boson. Has it been discovered ?
Read Nostradamous, Read the Bible.
2012 is all we need to know.

Got to die of somthing!!!!

I guess we dont have to worry about bush flushing the country down the toilet.  It will be sucked into a tiny black hole anyway. lol.

Correct me if I'm wrong (because I'm no physicist)but a number of things could come out of this big scary collider thing. I'm assuming that String theory and the Standard model are mutually exclusive. So under that assumption either:

A. String Theory works and they can make a micro black hole, which may or may not be dangerous. Most likely not dangerous at all. Even String theorists themselves have said that it could only happen under very certain conditions which the LHC probably can't produce.

                -or-
B. They find the Higgs boson and the Standard Model works and there is no possibility of a Micro black hole forming at all.

It seems to me that all the hub-bub on the internet over this thing has blown String Theory way out of proportion and in doing so has mucked the standard model and String Theory together so that there is no discernable line between the two when in fact they are two very different theories trying to explain the same thing.

At least that is what I, as a simple non-college educated man, got out all the reading I've done. Furthermore it makes no sense to me that well educated men and women would devise a machine to explain our existence that has the possibility of undoing it all together that's like saying "well if we can't figure it out how and why we're here, we might as well not be here at all", and somehow I can't fathom anyone saying that.

Tiny black holes destroying our world. Possibly the same line of thinking when some cave man watched his first lunar or solar eclipse.
Living in the NW we put up with an occasional earthquake, or a volcano, and our new home will be on a sand spit on the SW Eashington Coast which will leave us unprotected against a tsunami.
We're not concerned about these three happenings, nor are we concerned about a comet smashing into earth. Tiny blackholes? Give me a break.  My old high school physics teacher is probably rolling with laughter.

Bill from TX,
   Ever since I was 12, I remember hearing how the Myan calendar ended around 2011 or 2012.  Much more recently, people I very much respect from the martial arts and alternative healthcare circles also hinted at a grand happening during that time.  The only catch phrase that I recall was that the sky is to open up to let the cosmic energies in.  I didn't get the feeling from them that this was supposed to be a bad time but just that a lot of preparations were being made for it.  I honestly don't know what to expect.  Do we wish ourselves luck now, or fight all that much harder to make positive changes in the world we know?  Aparently other ancient cultures from around the world felt something about this time as well.  

P.S. The next solar maximum (expected to be the worst in recent history) just so happens to also be in 2012 :)    

Let's see:
The beginning of our universe was the will of the divine in an instant.
or
The beginning of our universe was the result of the Big Bang in an instant.

We might all be destroyed by terrorist planting bombs.
or
We might all be destroyed by super powers dropping bombs.

The world might end in an instant by the will of the divine.
or
The world might end in an instant by being sucked down a mini-or mighty black hole.

If we don't look, we won't know.
or
If we look we might not like what we see.

I think we are stuck in a black hole if you ask me.

At around 1:45 AM Tues morning as the shuttle prepares to re-enter earths atmosphere, a piece of
(what the heck is it?) was photo'd below them.
They called it, "The Object" as it appeared to be almost fallowing them?  As of 9:50AM Central, only
msnbc gave mention.  LOOK CLOSELY my friends.  

Ok, the skinny on the black hole factory.  These babies will be no more than a pair of colliding protons creating a microscopic black hole that will evaporate in something less than a trillionth of a second (don't take my word for it, Stephen Hawking recently ended up paying out a set of encyclopedias because he had to admit he was wrong, and black holes do give off radiation and evaporate).

Why these aren't dangerous?  Easy, they will be composed of two protons colliding with one another.  This means that these micro black holes will have no more mass than a helium nucleus, i.e. next to nothing.  Gravity doesn't just magically run amok when a black hole forms, its just matter compressed into a much denser form.  It won't have any more gravitational pull on the machine or the particles around it than a helium nucleus would.  They're going to be lucky if more than a handful of these black holes are formed with over 100 million attempted collisions per experiment, so the odds of one of these black holes actually forming, then running into enough particles to actually sustain itself is null.  Ain't happening.  The odds are, even if it could sustain itself for any meaningful length of time, its small enough it could fly through the Earth and not yank anything into it anyway.  Fully compressed, it could fly through a hydrogen atom with nary a ripple. ...

The phenomena of Black-hole seems to have not been understood properly by most of the scienific community.

Black-hole is a misnomer.It should be replaced by Electro-magnetic Phenomena and Waveguides.The Energy retrieval is a diificult process as science today has not advanced beyond Solar-plane. SCIENCE IS AT CROSS ROADS.There are many inherent contradictions in this approach

have scientists considered the possibility that the Big Bang was created by the last lot of scientists to evolve to the same stage as we are, blowing the universe up by recreating the Big Bang

There's a very interesting article about this in a consumer/lifestyle magazine I contribute to called bob in Manchester, England. You can download the pdf of it at bobmagazine.co.uk
In the article they talk to Dr Brian Cox from Manchester University - a CERN employee and renowned particle physicist. He seems to have some of the answers to the various concerns, but only some, and is decidely unsurefooted when it comes to head on stationary collisions within the LHC. See what you think anyway.
There's also an opinion piece about it on my blog (oschester). Here's what I had to say... for what it's worth!

Risking it all

The question is; when it comes to the safety of the planet, is it worth taking even the smallest of potential risks?
The scientists at CERN, with their budgets of billions and backing of 20 governments, seem to think this is a moot point. They plan to prize open a cosmic door with their light speed collisions next April or May, no matter what fears there may be that the mother of all booby traps waits behind it.
And to be fair, you can‘t blame them.
Their colossal experiment has taken a decade to prepare, every theory they have about the foundations of the universe is reliant upon it and the staggering budget they’ve received will surely never be repeated unless they make their big money shot and consummate the deal. There is no backing out now.
What’s more, and here’s the key argument in their favour, they are the ones that are qualified to make the decision on its safety.
In fact, to be fair, they are the ONLY ones who are truly qualified – and that’s also a crucial part of the problem.
The doom-monger, or even just the neutral that’s prone to worrying about his ass disappearing down a black hole, will surely be ruminating over the possibility that they’re too close to the woods to see the trees. That their future’s are so intertwined with the LHC’s snaking 27km of tunnelling that they’ve lost their ability to think outside the tube.
Hence we see a bunker mentality emerge when anyone has the temerity to question the validity of taking a chance with an experiment on this scale - of basing activity that could impact on the entire planet on unproven theorising. The questioners become amateurs, lunatics or irrational conspiracy theorists, when in reality they’re only concerned citizens of a global community worrying about the futures of themselves and their families.
They deserve the right to express their opinions – their theories – and they deserve to get a true understanding of what’s going on before someone flicks the big switch.
If they don’t get that CERN will only have themselves to blame if a Simpsons-esque mob ends up marching on Geneva – replete with ‘down with progress’ placards – intent on smashing up the LHC with broken bottles and planks sporting rusty nails in them. And no one wants that.
What both parties should want is a more open, public discussion about the LHC.
Science is an esoteric field and therefore not inclined to popular democracy, but when we’re talking about planet shifting experiments maybe it should be (we all have an opinion on CO2 emissions and global warming after all).
We should be made to understand the processes that will take place there and the potential for calamity. CERN should be taking more time to communicate what it hopes to achieve and the dangers of not taking that step forward into the unknown. We have to discuss whether this is the right thing to do and assess whether any risk, no matter how small, is acceptable.
People tend not to get involved in fields like science because they don’t understand it and don’t want to be made to feel stupid by questioning the experts. With issues like the LHC however, I think it’s time that that pride took a back seat.
After all, I’d rather be a living, breathing idiot than a dead stupid fool. That’s one risk that’s definitely worth taking.

The Large Hadron Collider [LHC] at CERN might create numerous different particles that heretofore have only been theorized.  Numerous peer-reviewed science articles have been published on each of these, and if you google on the term "LHC" and then the particular particle, you will find hundreds of such articles, including:

1) Higgs boson

2) Magnetic Monopole

3) Strangelet

4) Miniature Black Hole [aka nano black hole]

In 1987 I first theorized that colliders might create miniature black holes, and expressed those concerns to a few individuals.  However, Hawking's formula showed that such a miniature black hole, with a mass of under 10,000,000 a.m.u., would "evaporate" in about 1 E-23 seconds, and thus would not move from its point of creation to the walls of the vacuum chamber [taking about 1 E-11 seconds travelling at 0.9999c] in time to cannibalize matter and grow larger.

In 1999, I was uncertain whether Hawking radiation would work as he proposed.  If not, and if a mini black hole were created, it could potentially be disastrous.  I wrote a Letter to the Editor to Scientific American [July, 1999] about that issue, and they had Frank Wilczek, who later received a Nobel Prize for his work on quarks, write a response.  In the response, Frank wrote that it was not a credible scenario to believe that minature black holes could be created.

Well, since then, numerous theorists have asserted to the contrary.  Google on "LHC Black Hole" for a plethora of articles on how the LHC might create miniature black holes, which those theorists believe will be harmless because of their faith in Hawking's theory of evaporation via quantum tunneling.

The idea that rare ultra-high-energy cosmic rays striking the moon [or other astronomical body] create natural miniature black holes -- and therefore it is safe to do so in the laboratory -- ignores one very fundamental difference.

In nature, if they are created, they are travelling at about 0.9999c relative to the planet that was struck, and would for example zip through the moon in about 0.1 seconds, very neutrino-like because of their ultra-tiny Schwartzschild radius, and high speed.  They would likely not interact at all, or if they did, glom on to perhaps a quark or two, barely decreasing their transit momentum.

At the LHC, however, any such novel particle created would be relatively 'at rest', and be captured by Earth's gravitational field, and would repeatedly orbit through Earth, if stable and not prone to decay.  If such miniature black holes don't rapidly evaporate and are produced in copious abundance [1/second by some theories], there is a much greater probability that they will interact and grow larger, compared to what occurs in nature.

There are a host of other problems with the "cosmic ray argument" posited by those who believe it is safe to create miniature black holes.  This continuous oversight of obvious flaws in reasoning certaily should give one pause to consider what other oversights might be present in the theories they seek to test.

I am not without some experience in science.

In 1975 I discovered the tracks of a novel particle on a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector.  "Evidence for Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole", Price et al., Physical Review Letters, August 25, 1975, Volume 35, Number 8.    A magnetic monopole was first theorized in 1931 by Paul A.M. Dirac, Proceedings of the Royal Society (London), Series A 133, 60 (1931), and again in Physics Review 74, 817 (1948).  While some pundits claimed that the tracks represented a doubly-fragmenting normal nucleus, the data was so far removed from that possibility that it would have been only a one-in-one-billion chance, compared to a novel particle of unknown type.  The data fit perfectly with a Dirac monopole.

While I would very much love to see whether we can create a magnetic monopole in a collider, ethically I cannot currently support such because of the risks involved.

For more information, go to:   www.LHCdefense.org

Regards,

Walter L. Wagner (Dr.)

the theory that the smaller a black hole the hotter it is is only a theory. Plus to have heat, it needs to be in space and time. Things need to be moving.  A logical definition of a black hole is a particle outside of space, since there is nothing relative within it. Just good old fashioned matter. All matter and nothing but matter. no space in matter. Is that right.  If the singularity is plane old mater, it has no space and  is not in time.Time is at a standstill within it.  If is not in space or time, it cant be hot. Black holes are dangerous. We know that. Why make one on earth, for what purpose.

Maybe the reason there are no other sentient life forms in this universe besides ourselves that we have yet registered lies at the center of every galaxy and a botched otherworldly CERN experiment?

New argument for intelligent design. "Dead highly evolved 'highly intelligent' species create the core of every known spiral galaxy! Film at 11. Intelligent life as abundant as predicted, just extinct and much older than man!"

As for black holes destroying everything, I understand that it probably won't happen, but the thing is that it "probably" won't. It's like jumping into water from a cliff. You 'probably' would die, but sometimes by chance, you hit the deepest part of the water and live with a couple scratches. But how
do you get out from where you landed?

Why even jump off of the cliff?

All I am saying is, why do we have to make quarks and smash protons to figure out how, even why, we're alive and there is a world to live in? Isn't that good enough...?

Perhaps their curiousity is comsuming them to do this.
So what happens when they find out and that particular curiousity is taken away? Would something do that to the world instead?
But then again, it's a bit like crossing the street. If you don't look down either side of the road, you could be hit by a car when you cross. Everyone would tell you that, maybe even to NOT cross the road in the first place. There would be less accidents, but there also wouldn't many people getting anywhere, would there?

My only questions for these scientists are:
What would you do if there was an accidental release of a black hole from your ever-so-faithful radiation?
What would be your plan to stop it?

~Cosmic Musings of an Eighth Grader

Lol they quote a software developer at Cern as a reason to be concerned.  I'm a software developer who works with physicists. The reason I'm not a physicist is because I don't know anything about physics, which is surely true of ran livneh as well.

There was a time when Radiation wasn't considered dangerous.  Turned out it was.

There was a time when the Earth was thought to be flat.  Turned out it is round(ish).

When scientists make claims such as: "For instance, the physicists would say that enough of the doomsday particles still should have been captured by neutron stars or cosmic gas clouds to have an impact. No such impact has ever been seen. Therefore, no doomsday."

 It concerns me that a See no, Hear no, Say no evil argument is presented, with no scientific basis behind it.  Its the same attitude prevalent when people thought the world was flat.  They couldn't observe it was round, so it must not be, when in fact it is.

"Was it Franklin who said that those who desire both freedom and security deserve neither?  Beware giving power to anyone who offers security and asks for more power and authority (guess who?). "

Get the quote right.

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."  - Ben Franklin

Its amazing to me that still today we deal with fear and ignorance when dealing with the unknown.

Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but why is it that every time we get close to massive breakthroughs in particle physics, matter/energy interaction, the experiment is squashed?  Anyone remember the SSC in Waxahachie, TX?  Granted, that ran over budget, but why stop when so close.  Now this?

I can't wait for the new carbon dating for the Shroud of Turin.  That will probably be shutdown too as it MAY cast doubt on things we know and are comfortable with.  Does the Sun still orbit around the Earth?  No?!?!?  Better start hanging people and rioting.

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