Is the world going to end tomorrow?

Your teacher is clearly more interested in junk science than actual science.

This experiment isn’t going to destroy the world, or really have much of an impact on anything except our understanding of how matter is formed.

according to someone working at CERN, its ‘nonsence’, but I’ll agree with mikeh in saying that there IS a tiny chance.

I’m not sure what the actual figures are, but I’ve heard on in 5 million, one in one hundred million, 5%, 2%, so I have no idea.

But in my opinon, this whole thing is ludicrous and the fact that people are willing to sacrifice the population of the world, even if the chances of it are tiny, is ridiculous, just to find out something we don’t NEED to know…

To be fair, when a number of scientists quietly clear their throats and admit that yes, when the collider is turned on, there might JUST be the TINIEST possibility of thousands of black holes opening up 300 feet beneath the Swiss tundra, there is more reason to be concerned than there usually is. This isn’t “Jesus is coming to call his faithful home” doom and gloom or even “The bird flu is going to kill us all” doom and gloom. This is “We really don’t know what’s going to happen when we turn this thing on” doom and gloom.

While I don’t think there’s any real cause for alarm, if you WERE going to be alarmed, I wouldn’t really blame you.

EDIT: Some jerk made a terrifying video of a worst-case scenario when they hit “ON.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXzugu39pKM

no. relax.

No, it isn’t

There’s a lot of concern about the “atom smasher” or whatever you want to call it causing a disruption disastrous enough to end the world, but it won’t

There has been enough research and safety measures taken to ensure the experiment is safe

Don’t worry - it will all be fine

Suppose the world doesn’t end tomorrow. Will you then realize that the doom and gloom end times lunatics are in fact full of carp?

uh… the world can end any day not just the beginning of the year!!! But even if it does everyone would die not just u! And worrying ain’t going to stop it. just make sure you have god’s forgiveness if you are really worried about this.

If your SCIENCE teacher did in fact say, “The world is going to end tomorrow.” …they should be fired.

• They’re not actually engaging in any collisions when they first fire it up. It’s just a test run in which they circulate a beam to make sure everything’s working.
• When they do test it with collisions, they’ll be testing it at a low power that’s already been done hundreds or thousands of times in other supercolliders around the world.
• When they do fire it up to full power (probably some time next year), yes, there’s a theory that predicts microscopic black holes. The theory’s considered pretty unlikely, and even if they do form, they will ‘evaporate’ back into nothing in extremely short order.
• The sort of collisions they’ll be testing at full power happen in our upper atmosphere all the time. If microscopic black holes are formed that way, the earth would have been consumed by them long ago.

So in a nutshell: No, the world will not end this wednesday, or when they actually use it to test collisions, or when they fire it up to full power. No, not even a ‘small’ chance - no chance at all.