The much-anticipated Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, will begin operating in the next few days, and physicists and lay science watchers alike are really excited to find out if it will reveal new secrets about the most basic building blocks of all matter, and through that new insights on the origins of the universe itself.
A so far untested part of the hugely successful Standard Model of Particle Physics involves the Higgs boson, which is responsible for giving every other massive particle its mass. It is a minimum theory, that is, the simplest model that fits the known data. If the Higgs particle is found, Hadron boffins will be drunk on Champagne for weeks. If it isn't, well, somebody else will have a chance to win a Nobel prize for finding a less minimal solution to cosmic puzzles and tweaking the standard model. There is also the matter of supersymmetric particles, which may show up later in the show. If they do, string theory proponents will be jumping up and down in joy for a heck of a long time, at least claiming some sort of real hard data to support their not-yet scientific theory.
If all that doesn't excite you, the massive project will undoubtedly also lead to great progress in computing and other technology. Famously, the world wide web itself was created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN to allow physicists to share precisely the kind of data the LHC will produce in astronomical amounts.
Some people, however, are not as much excited as scared. Reasonably qualified individuals have proposed that there is a chance that the LHC will create microscopic black holes that can swallow the entire Earth, strangelets (which are strange even by nuclear physics standards), magnetic monopoles or even vacuum bubbles. The latter could be the end of not only the Earth, but the entire known universe, which isn't bad for a man made device on a tiny speck of dust in a run-of-the mill galaxy.
The clever people involved with the LHC, however, have issued a report and a FAQ assuring us all that the world is not going to end on Wednesday.
That's a relief.
Of course, if they are wrong and a microscopic black hole ends up consuming the entire world, they will not be in a position to take complaints, and we will not be able to make any.
In that case, we'll all be meeting in Switzerland, very briefly, and very soon.
Update: Now it's quite precisely 12 hours left. While you're waiting, read Soccer Dad's Ghostbuster's reference! He also sends me an interesting article pointing out that Dr Stephen Hawking hopes for, but doesn't believe, that the LHC will actually produce tiny black holes.
10:21:18 PM 
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