Dissection of fear-mongering

I saw this article on National Geographic's Web page yesterday, and I revisited it tonight as I wrote this Xomblurb.

Though the entire article is pretty bubblegum and plays up the Doomsday angle, let's look past all the B.S. and draw the truth from it-

"There's also a very, very remote chance that the process will spawn black holes—any one of which could assume an odd orbit within Earth, devouring microscopic chunks of matter until the entire planet is gone, physicists say.

This and other harrowing—and equally unlikely—scenarios prompted a couple of independent scientists to sue this past spring to stop the atom smasher. So far they haven't succeeded, and the vast majority of the world's physicists are on board with the project."

Notice, while it's presenting the claim by some nutjobs that the LHC will destroy the entire planet, focus on what I emphasized. The likelihood of this is remote. It is "unlikely". The LHC isn't even fully operational at this point, so simply throwing the switch that is sending the particles in only one direction (i.e. they aren't colliding) isn't going to destroy the universe.

Their claims are outlined on the second page of the article-
"In court dockets, the pair call the atom smasher a "dark matter factory" that will spawn self-propelled bombs, "that is, substances, which actively attract and transform our normal matter and whose strength is such that once they become stable they cannot be controlled or destroyed by human beings."

Notice, the rebuttal of this claim is also on the second page-
"To form black holes, the Large Hadron Collider would need to generate many billions of times more energy than it can"

"And even if black holes formed, he said, they would be smaller than protons—which fit in the nuclei of atoms—and would evaporate in a miniscule fraction of a second, "long before they could grow by [absorbing] other matter," "

"He said there's "zero probability of forming the types of scary scenarios that are being talked about.""

"The collider experiments will mimic what has already happened a hundred thousand times when cosmic rays have bombarded Earth, Goldfarb said. If any of the feared possibilities were real risks, then continuous, natural cosmic ray assaults would have destroyed the planet long ago, he added."

And notice, we're still here.