LHC will not destroy the universe in 5 days
In case you're still worried that the universe will wink out of existence in 5 days when they turn on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, rest easy: a new report from the LHC Safety Assessment Group says it ain't gonna happen. Or, as one physicist told me when I asked about this last month while researching my Petacentres article for Nature, "Look, it's a 10^-19 chance, and you've got a 10^-11 chance of suddenly evaporating while shaving."The report explains that if particle collisions at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, we would never have been given the chance to exist, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth or other astronomical bodies.LHC Switch-on Fears Are Completely Unfoundeda The Safety Assessment Group writes, “Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth – and the planet still exists.”
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