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Originally Posted by Krorie  No I didn't realize that.
I know they wouldn't last to long, but a slight malfunction or something could cause something to go wrong. I do think the person who wrote the article was trying to make things worse than it is. Then again it is the Sun newspaper and all they write about is a bunch of crap anyway. |
But what, exactly, could go wrong? To what extreme? Scientists have been using particle accelerators since 1931 (before World War II!). The only difference here is that this one is larger than the others that have been built, but also more advanced. It is also staffed by some of the most intelligent physicists in the world. So far, the only theories I've heard for things that could go wrong sound like conspiracy theories and end-of-the-world scenarios, and few of them have been supported by real science.
EDIT:
I found a statistic. A while back, the folks at the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collidor in New York) thought that they had created a micro black hole by slamming two gold nuclei together. It lasted for about "1 * 10^-98 seconds."
Beyond that, given that the two forces governing the strength of a gravitational field are mass and distance, I doubt we have a problem. I mean, we're talking an almost negligible mass. What type of gravitational field does a penny create? Now imagine an atom. That's around 10^-16 of a meter.
Do people honestly expect something that small to generate the same gravitational pull as a spacial black hole, created by the collapse of a star? If so, those people know very little about gravity and the basic fundamentals of physics.
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