End of the world hysteria project prompts death threats

Fear and paranoia is building to a potentially dangerous level as European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN) scientists seeking answers related to the universe’s origins prepare to officially flip the switch on their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this coming Wednesday.


More pointedly, CERN officials have begun receiving frantic phone calls, e-mails and even death threats from those who staunchly believe the massive underground machine could create black holes capable of consuming the planet.

The Large Hadron Collider, which is the largest particle accelerator ever built, is a giant ring constructed just outside of Geneva and around 300ft below the Swiss-Franco border. Originally offered up as a concept in 1994, the collider has cost somewhere in the region of $8 billion USD to develop and create.

Once switched on, it will circulate atomic particles around its 17-mile circumference at more than 11,000 times per second before then smashing those atoms into each other to simulate the first moments experienced by our universe immediately after the Big Bang.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University has revealed that Frank Wilczek, an American Nobel prize-winning physicist from MIT, has received threats against his life with regard to Wednesday’s launch of the groundbreaking collider.

James Gillies, the head of communication and spokesman for CERN, has also said that he trawls through tearful phones calls and e-mails every day from concerned members of the public looking for reassurances as to the survival of mankind. Some of those people contacting CERN can also be aggressive.

Gillies said that: “There are a number who say: “You are evil and dangerous and you are going to destroy the world.”

The beleaguered CERN representative went on to outline his own mounting frustrations at the level of ignorance being shown towards the contributory scientific benefits that the Large Hadron Collider may well provide.

“I find myself getting slightly angry,” he said to The Telegraph, “not because people are getting in touch but the fact they have been driven to do that by what is nonsense. What we are doing is enriching humanity, not putting it at risk.”

The LHC machine has been designed to help scientists discover new forms of particles, including what they refer to as the illusive Higgs Boson (or God Particle), along with more in-depth knowledge connected to dark matter and the differences between matter and antimatter.

Not that it is likely to assuage the fears of those who remain convinced the world is about to come to a cataclysmic end, but CERN’s particle collider has undergone extensive safety checks by the LHC Safety Assessment Group, which has recently reviewed and updated an initial LHC safety study carried out in 2003.

Specifically, the new ‘Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions’ report supports evidence that energetic cosmic rays that regularly strike the planet are far more powerful than anything that will be created within the Large Hadron Collider when scientists finally begin smashing particles on Sept. 10 (that process will start several weeks after the upcoming go-date).

“Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth -- and the planet still exists,” explains the report.

News of the growing hysteria attached to the LHC device follows a recent injunction brought before the European Court of Human Rights by those opposing CERN's collider.

The injunction seeks to have the project shut down on the grounds that its scientists have not fully explored all the necessary precautions related to the protection of human life.

10th september 2008 :Danger for Earth ?

The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by 2010. Housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel, it relies on technologies that would not have been possible 30 years ago. The LHC is, in a sense, its own prototype.
Starting up such a machine is not as simple as flipping a switch. Commissioning is a long process that starts with the cooling down of each of the machine’s eight sectors. This is followed by the electrical testing of the 1600 superconducting magnets and their individual powering to nominal operating current. These steps are followed by the powering together of all the circuits of each sector, and then of the eight independent sectors in unison in order to operate as a single machine.

One of the most fascinating technological marvels of our time is scheduled to be fully turned on next week, amidst noticeable concern that the LHC unleashes uncontainable energies that eventually could result in the destruction of our planet.As it turns out, nature is the biggest proponent for the "no danger" argument cited by the IOP. There is a common and natural process whereby energetic cosmic rays striking Earth's upper atmosphere regularly produce the equivalent an LHC experiment. In fact, there have been more than 100,000 of them naturally on Earth. In addition, many of those collisions produced particles which exceed the energy potential of LHC.Researchers delving into the safety of the LHC point out there have been no "hypothetical black holes or strangelets, no vacuum bubbles or dangerous magnetic monopoles" even with the higher energy collisions. They do point out that the LHC's collisions will differ from those of high energy cosmic rays in that the LHC's generated particle velocity will be slower. They also state that the particle energy created by the LHC will be roughly the same as that of two mosquitos colliding. They state, "any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists."The big concerns from watchdogs like Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho earlier this year, and the more recent and final hurdle, a collaborative effort by a group of concerned scientists overturned by the European Court of Human Rights in late August, reside in the unknowns. While the safety experts indicate that any potential black holes produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophycists, that unknown potential is exactly the complaint by the concerned parties.Barring some kind of last minute difficulty or challenge, the LHC is scheduled to go online Wednesday, September 10, 2008, the official "switch on" date. And as of right now it has already been used in low-yield tests and will continue to be right up until Wednesday carrying out what physicists describe as "massive" tests.

Large Hadron Collider (LHC )will fire the first proton beam,On September 10th:Death threats for scientist

The Large Hadron Collider, which is run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, lies in a 27-kilometre-long underground circuit beneath the French-Swiss border and is set to begin low-energy operations on Sept. 10.
It has attracted worldwide attention, in part because it has been a costly project, with a total budget of $9 billion. But it has also raised fears among the general populace about the potential dangers of such a large experiment.
Those fears are unfounded, wrote the safety assessment group for the LHC in a study published Friday. The safety group said its latest review should dispel fears of universe-gobbling black holes or anti-matter destroying the Earth.
If particle collisions like the ones created at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, such interactions would have wiped out the planet long ago, the group wrote Friday in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics.
"Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth – and the planet still exists," they wrote.
It's the second such study by the safety assessment group. The first study, published in 2003, came to similar conclusions.
The collider will use a ring of super-cooled magnets to push two proton beams to speeds and energies never before reached under controlled conditions, crashing the protons into one another to create and detect a host of new particles.
It is expected to be the most powerful tool yet for physicists hoping to uncover the secrets behind the laws of the universe, both on the tiny scale of quantum mechanics and the huge domain of galaxies and black holes.
Physicists from universities across Canada will be involved in the LHC's operations through the ATLAS experiment, one of two main experiments studying the results of proton-on-proton collisions.

On September 10th, scientists at the LHC will fire the first proton beams down the super collider. These proton beams will have a modest 450 GeV or less than one-tenth of the collider’s full strength and no collisions are expected because the beams will only be fired one way through the tunnel. Eventually CERN hopes the LHC help scientists discover the elusive Higgs-Boson particle by smashing together proton beams with 5-7 TeV worth of energy.Some scientists have theorized that such collisions could cause a miniature black hole to form and obliterate our planet, but such collisions in the form of cosmic rays have been occurring on Earth and other planets for a long time. In fact these collisions pack much more of a punch than anything the LHC can produce. However, this hasn’t stopped people from trying to stop the project.MIT professor and Nobel Prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek is just one of the scientists who has received death threats in the past days, according to the Telegraph UK.But for anyone who’s thinks the LHC will end the world, Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University said, “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t***.” Hey wasn’t he supposed to use a more scientific word?