How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the LHC

I saw this post in another blog, and just had to re-post it here :)

With the news that the Large Hadron Collider has started colliding particles, there has been a lot of mis-information flowing on the hazards of subatomic black holes and other dangers of high energy physics. This seems to be a combination of chicken-littles who love to panic, members of the media who love a scandal, and scientists who are too enamored of their own theories or experiments to give practical information on the LHC to the public.

Since I am also a trained physicist, let me say clearly the LHC will not destroy the Earth!

And here is the reason why we are so certain. The LHC set a record yesterday for the highest energy man-made collisions. But it is a tiny fraction of the energy the occurs in nature, even in our own atmosphere. The Earth is constantly being bombarded by gamma-rays and cosmic rays from space, and when they hit the atmosphere the reactions are easily a million times higher than anything the LHC will do.

So if tiny black holes can be formed (and as a sideline, most astrophysics evidence says they won't) then they have been forming in our atmosphere for billions of years. Modern physics and the lack of any observed black holes indicate that they will decay very quickly.We are still here, so therefore they are not dangerous.

The real advantage of the LHC isn't the energies it reaches - those are already reached naturally. The advantage is that we can make the reactions happen when and where we want - like inside a very big laboratory where the results can be studied.

So quit worrying, and love the LHC!