Hattix

It’s like a lingering bad smell that won’t go away. A tiny number of entirely uneducated people believe (and yes, this is faith, not reason) that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy Earth! It’s turned on full power on Wednesday (though experiments don’t begin in full until next spring) and, the gibbering lunacy goes, might produce black holes that do not obey the laws of physics. I kid you not.

It physically cannot happen. Its not even improbable, it’s impossible.

Cosmic rays pound particles in the upper atmosphere with incredible amounts of energy, far higher than the LHC will ever go. Earth’s still here. Even if microscopic black holes are created, they’re no threat at all. Black holes evaporate through Hawking Radiation (Named for Stephen Hawking, who first theorised and quantified it) but the amount of Hawking Radiation emitted is proportional to the volume of a black hole, not its mass. The volume increases very, very slowly as mass increases so really massive black holes, like those in the cores of galaxies, would take many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the Universe to evaporate. On the opposite end of the scale, a black hole the size of a grapefruit would be gone in just a few hours. Black holes the size of subatomic particles will be gone in nanoseconds.

So even if those cosmic rays in the high atmosphere do produce micro-scale black holes, they’re gone very rapidly. The energy domain of the LHC may be sufficient to form a micro-scale black hole (though it’s very unlikely) but it’ll be even smaller than the hypothetical ones made in the upper atmosphere, so evaporate even more rapidly.

There’s another twisted tale about strangelets (clumps of strange matter). Strangelets are bits of matter composed of up, down and strange quarks, normal nuclei are just composed of up and down quarks. One theory goes that strange matter is more stable than normal matter and so when a strange quark encounters a nucleus, it converts the protons and neutrons to strange matter and more strange quarks, setting in effect a chain reaction which would consume all matter in the universe. Again, natural processes are far more energetic than the LHC and they haven’t destroyed the universe for at least the last fourteen billion years.

However the laws of physics aren’t enough to prevent lunacy. Go read that link a moment. I’ll wait.

Back? Good. This is partly our problem. We haven’t done enough outreach, haven’t done enough education to ensure that these kinds of wild misconceptions aren’t made to begin with. Science as a whole needs to be more accessible, more interesting and more engaging so that even the “man on the street” won’t fall for this kind of sick stunt.