Scientists in Geneva Switserland will start to investigate the Big Bang on september 10th 2008 with a machine called ‘Large Hadron Collider’ which has cost over 9 billion dollars to make. The machine essentially rotates particles at high level speeds, which could cause them to collide and create a so-called ‘black hole’, a hole in space that sucks in all material surrounding it.

As I understand it a black hole the size of a match would be large enough to swallow the whole earth. Some scientists are so worried about this experiment they have gone to the European human rights court to try stop this experiment. However this will not stop the experiment as that court is way too bureaucratic to take fast decisions.

Main opponent of the experiment is Otto Rossler. He says it could spawn mini black holes which, within four years, could grow big enough to suck the earth inside out. I have googled Rossler. He is a scientist, but not at all a particles expert. This is his wikipedia page

Rossler writes:

“My own calculations have shown it is quite plausible that these little black holes survive and will grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside,” he warned.

“I have been calling for CERN to hold a safety conference to prove my conclusions wrong but they have not been willing.”

Most likely Rosslers concerns are poppycock, however, but the thing is one can’t be absolutely sure about these sort of things, which does make the experiment sort of risky. But just how risky we will never know. Or at least not any time soon. Normally black holes wouldnt form at the amounts of energy the LHC controls, according to wikipedia:

Under standard theories, such an energy to produce a micro black hole is orders of magnitude greater than that which can be produced on Earth in particle accelerators such as the LHC (maximum about 1.15 � 106 GeV), or detected in cosmic ray collisions in our atmosphere. It is estimated[citation needed] that to collide two aggregates of fermions to within a distance of a Planck length with the currently achievable magnetic field strength would require a ring accelerator about 1000 light years in diameter to keep the aggregates on track. Even if it were possible, any collision product would be immensely unstable, and almost immediately disintegrate[citation needed].

The problem here lies at the start of the sentence: ‘under standard theories’ meaning we have very little experience in this field.

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