Many have posted about the mass particle collider that powered up yesterday, and the fact is, we aren't out of the woods yet! The EU scientists are going to run it at higher and higher power until they can run it safely at full power.
For those who don't know, the mass particle collider is 17 miles(22km) long and shaped in a circle. The way it works is they take protons and use huge magnets to accelerate them to nearly the speed of light, then smash them together. According to the theory of relativity(e=mc2), so much energy bottled up in such a tiny amount of space could cause the energy to transform into subatomic particles. These perticles, supposedly part of the Big Bang, could help scientists understand the beginning of the universe. The particle they are looking for is supposedly heavier than they expected, and if it sticks around, its gravity could mean the creation of a black hole...
What are the odds the Large Hydron Collider will destroy the Earth.?
Microscopically small. You have to realise, anything we try to do with particle accelerators is happening millions of times more often and millions of times more powerfully at the top of our atmosphere where high energy cosmic rays are pounding down on the Earth. If this hasn't led to the destruction of mankind in the last 4 billion years, the LHC is going to be fine.
