Why on Earth would you need to *** out the word "twit?"

BTW, I agree with Prof. Cox.

Maybe if they pray really hard the world wont blow up. And then they can thank their god's for the miracle.

how long would it take to consume the Earth?

Please save people on our planet! People who love make nuclear, or largest machine will destroy our Earth. I see on YouTube about that. They people are laughing same as devil. Sound like laughing similar to Satan! Stop!! I hate them! God will sue people who are laughing same as Satan! Please ban Large Hadron Collider machine to save Earth and people! Report all over world and listen from news on internet and TV. This really scare me out! A lot of people are still worry and yell out so hard! I have bad stress to hear from this bad news what will happen to our earth on Sept. 10, 2008. My heart is hurt right now! I can feel from there will kill us on whole world. :-(

High Energy Collisions happen continuously in the upper atmosphere from cosmic rays. Some of the collisions produce the same minature 'black holes' as the LHC. They exist for a fraction of a second then disappear in a puff of radation. The amount of energy to create a large stable black hole is many orders of magnitude higher than what can be produced in the LHC.

Why hasn't Evolution taken care of stupid people yet? Why? Why? Why?

Because physicists made the unfortunate mistake of nic-naming the particle they're searching for the "God Particle", so now every religious crazy on the planet is up in arms.

Exercising some common sense would have kept the crazies busy elsewhere.

About 10 years ago, I wrote about this event. In my novel, the good guys make a valiant effort but as it turns out the hero is not as strong as you might hope and he makes a wrong choice which causes the Collider to be put into operation. And the world does come to an end. I hope fact is not stranger than fiction.

Particle collision events in and around this planet that are far more powerful than anything the LHC is even remotely capable of producing occur every day, all the time. No "singularities" have gobbled up the planet yet and it's been here for billions of years.
Even if we get a "micro-black hole" out of a collision (doubtful in the extreme), such a black hole just doesn't have enough mass to cause any type of gravitation event. ie. No "suck" mechanism. It just wouldn't be even remotely massive enough to sustain itself for more than a minuscule fraction of a second. The only thing that needs to be stopped or shut off the "ignorance and panic accelerator"

Scientists are almost uniformly good and descent people who work very hard for the betterment of society.

Unfortunately scientists are also human and sometimes make poor judgments and act on group think even when group think is dubious and sometimes wrong headed.

Never the less, personal threats of any kind are absolutely unacceptable.

That said, I'm not sure how credible young musician and professor Cox is when he also calls his opponents "t***s".

Don't be a t****, get LHCFacts.org

Every day there are cretins who believe the world is going to end soon. This has been going on for centuries and it is not about to stop.

They should find out where these dumbfucks' letters are coming from and tell the sender's government a letter to fix their education system.

besides, if we die, we die. boom

If we vaporize we won't notice. People are fearful of what they don't understand. Give science a chance. The world was flat and the sun revolved around the earth at one time.

This phenomenon is common in the United States: at the end of the day, these attention-getters look to sell themselves on the TV circuit, through books, and on the lecture circuit. The death threats are an act of desperation on the part of these pseudoscientific wackos because their lawsuit is now going badly. These anti-LHC characters have little or no physics background at an advanced level; as a legitimate physicist, John Wheeler, once said: "drive the pseudos out of the workshop of science!"

Honestly, these luddites need to crawl back under whatever rock they came out from. I just love how these morons take a statement like "might cause a black hole and eat the world" and take it as gosphel. These lunatics should be rounded up and shipped off to the arctic circle (while there's still an arctic circle left) and left to fend for themselves without technology, that should make them and the rest of us a lot happier.

It seems the writer of this article needs some more grammar lessons on comma usage and run-on sentences.

“Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t***.”
"Hey wasn’t he supposed to use a more scientific word?"

the thing is, if he used a scientific term for it these "part-time scientists"(more like dumbasses who think watching discovery channel on sundays makes them scientists) and "concerned citizens"(read: fools who believe all the nonsense they read about in tabloids) wouldn't understand what he were saying.

I'm going to be happy when the LHC has run and the world is still safe, I'm gonna yell "repent, the end is extremely frigging nigh!" in those doomsday sayers their face time after time again, just to teach em to keep their nose out of stuff they don't know the first things about.

These same fear mongers must be the ones who thought the world was going to end due to the Y2K bug. Well, guess what.. the world is still here 8 years later, and the world will STILL be here after LHC becomes fully operational.

Perhaps, the people that need to be chastised and threaten are the people working in the various governments who have taken part in financing this thing. A far greater number of people will die simply from neglect than shall be killed by the colider. Worse yet, that is not just not menial statistical possibility. It's absolute. What went toward building it and what must continue to be invested just to maintain it could have helped many people in disparate need. Instead, billions of dollars went into a black hole in the ground.

My theory is that the LHC is Dr Evil holding the world to RANSOM! http://tinyurl.com/6kfezl

I don't think just using it will result in anything cataclysmic, the terrifying prospect of the entire endeavor is that they will eventually -attempt- to create these micro black holes. That, and not the LHC itself, is the only thing that "scares" me.

t*** = ????

I realize it's a lot of fun for "people of science" to insult all of us "ignorant" "naysayers" and "brain-dead" individuals as nothing more than Chicken Littles with an active keyboard. But the reality is, when you dig deeper, you will see CERN's independent, third-party safety reviews are clearly lacking, and are merely set-up to "complement previous studies." They say there is "no conceivable threat from the LHC." But many of mankind's most famous tragedies came from "inconceivable threats" which, if those closely involved only had more imagination, would have clearly seen the threats-- such as icebergs, Chernobyl, and terrorists using aircraft as missles.

A healthy dialog about risks and rewards of the LHC should be encouraged and embraced -- but instead, CERN is more concerned with demonizing those who want us to move a bit slower examining the ramifications of these experiments. I think the people of this planet deserve more than a flippant response such as "we're still here aren't we?" when you're dealing with a much, much, much more powerful machine that can create temperatures "100,000 times hotter than the core of the sun" on Earth.

I've seen the info and seminars led by CERN to supposedly ease our concerns about this contraption, and it only leaves me much more concerned. The bitter animosity exhibited by the top scientists, such as Jonathan Ellis, toward any one who dares raise concerns about the LHC is truly frightening-- and shows how dangerous this whole project is. They are clearly blinded by their ambition-- and it is us, the people of the Earth, who may pay the ultimate consequence.

The LHC should not be fired up until more experiments by third-party groups are conducted. And CERN should quit attacking those who rightfully question the safety of the LHC.

CERN: Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining.

Oh... my... God. I can't believe these people know how to write or use a telephone, let alone make a threat.
We would all be better off if these hysterical, unthinking, monkeys would stop breathing our air, or at least just go back to their little lives. Stop flinging feces at each other and let the smart people do what they are doing.

By threatening these men and women you absolutely renounce all claim to respect of your fellow bipods. You are to be scorned and pointed at in public. Crimany.

Thanks also to tgdaily for wasting my time!

ok people... for those of you who don't understand these things, black holes ARE NOT cosmic vacuum cleaners that will suck up the entire earth. black holes are just point masses, or singularities, that only have the gravitational forces alloted by their respective masses. if the sun were to be replaced by a 1 solar mass black hole, the earth and all of the planets would simply orbit it just like they do now. NOTHING WOULD CHANGE IN THAT RESPECT.

the area inside of the collider is a vacuum, so if a mini black hole was to form:
1. it wouldn't have any matter to collect and therefor would not grow larger.
2. it would only have the gravitational force of the atomic or subatomic particles that created it.
3. black holes do emit energy, and therefor dissipate over time. a micro black hole wouldn't last very long, i think the numbers are around a few milliseconds, if that.

so, if a black hole was created it wouldn't have any more mass or gravitational force than the particles that created it, and it would "die" far before it had time to consume anything. so, for those of you that still don't understand, go back to your crusades against the horrible dihydrogen oxide or what ever else you're worried about... btw, dihydrogen oxide is just WATER!!

the work being done at LHC is extremely importent for completing the unified field theory, or the "Theory of Everything". poeple should support and praise such work and feats of human engineering and technological advancement.

i sure the right wing christian morons are just offended by the name of the 'large hardon collider'.. :P

@rjg
well actually we call you braindead naysaying chicken little moron hicks because you just ignore the proof and sicence behind this experiment.. as has been stated over and over again, collisions of several magnitudes larger size occur all the time in our atmosphere.. they dont cause the workd to end. period.

@guest86
wtf..? are you for real? if you are im amazed you're able to feed yourself..

“Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t***.” is a what? what word starting with a 't' is explicit

My humble opinion is that the people threatening those scientists are manipulated by some guru seeking a way to scare his victims.
Science is always a good and frightening black sheep in this case : The guru uses the 10% people understand as a "scientific paint" and fills it with 90% catastrophic lies to scare them and make them come to him : the ONE that holds the truth...

Thousands of people get destroyed by such deadly liars: some kill doctors, others threaten scientists or even become suicide bombers!
That's the only real frightening thing in all this.

Thanks to many advances in science (medicine) natural selection has nearly been removed from the equation. Stupid people are not only allowed, but assisted in breeding. *sigh*

there are so many derogatory terms starting with a T:
twit is one of them, twat is another, turd,...

all these doomsaying naysayers should be sent to a re-education camp to be properly taught in physics and astronomy.

“Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t***.”

Haha!, "t.w.a.t" - it's a nice British euphemism for an idiot or fool. It's also used to refer to a female's ....

A longtime reader - plese make the fonts bigger!

I believe guest86 and the most negatively voted comment here is a joke to ridicule the level of people who support the death threats and trying to stop progress. So forgive me for wishing it had 24 votes plus instead of minus.
My opinion to justify the fear from black holes: at the speed which they might be traveling, they would have enough time to "eat" a lot of stuff before "ending" their existence. And that lot of stuff will fuel not only their gravity force but also how long they'll "live". So indeed earth and the whole Solar System could be engulfed in an instant. But I still would give my vote to the continuation of experiments because I don't really believe myself when I say that the world might end. But even if it did, I look at it in an optimistic view: I just can't wait for it to happen :)
Curiosity is controversial, I know, and this is a delicious aspect of human existence. I would not want to live without it.

T.W.A.T

can be considered offensive, same as cee u next tuesday!

What's the point of death threats if the worlds going to end anyway? :P

...That believe the world is going to be destroyed by the LHC in the same category as the Gorebal Warming/Chicken Little/sky is falling crowd. Seriously, when a theory is presented as FACT and ALL ARGUEMENT AND DISSENT IS DISCOURAGED because "_it's already been decided_" and you are just a "disbeliever" it ceases to be science. We call this a religion. _CONSENSUS SCIENCE IS A RELIGION_ There is no such thing as consensus science. None! It's either science and stands up to critical, professional review, or alternatively, it's a "belief system" where you are either a believer or you need to be "converted" _THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT_ Scientific theories are SUPPOSED to be challenged. It's a VERY scary trend that this is being discouraged...

In our scientific investigations my colleagues and I utilized portable nuclear accelerators. The energy levels of the proton beams produced by our accelerators were nowhere near the levels of the LHC, yet we were always aware of the dangerously awesome potential for destruction that these tools could yield.

In the mid 1980's, this potential was exploited when we encountered an unusually large paranormal event. We focused multiple beams form our proton packs on a single point directly in front of the entity known as "Gozer the Gozerian". The result of crossing our beams was catastrophic to say the least, during the 15 second interval in which our beams had crossed, minor rift was created fortunately the enormous amount of Gozerian PKE that was present at the time was able to close rift almost as soon as the rift was created. Had this rift not been sealed by the Gozerian PKE, I estimate that the entire island of Manhattan, sections of New Jersey and Long Island would not be here today.

Anyone believing that we puny humans could do anything like create a black hole, which is one of the most powerful phenomena in the universe, is completely delusional. We may be able to kill ourselves in many ways, but doing so by any means that is significant on a cosmic scale is NOT one of them.

ok, as someone who has no idea about science, i would just like to ask what is this "god" particle and why is it so important. if this experement was so dangerous im sure that it wouldnt have even been built. seriously people with no background in this field should probly shut up and stop stalling progress. and anyways their only testing it anyways and no collisions will be made so why is it such a big deal

Just have to say I almost didn't get it Dr. Egen Spengler... that was funny!

Also to Bob, the reason the "God" particle is so important, this is the particle believed to produce mass. Imagine figuring out how to actually MAKE mass! Holy crap, imagine the materials you could possibly make if you were able to understand how to reproduce this event. Materials that you cannot find on earth or possibly even in our own galaxy. Materials both deadly and also ones that can be used for the betterment of the human race. (everything that has proven to be good has also proven to be terrible in its own way)

I would say the more pressing reason that physicists want to discover the higgs boson (god particle) so bad is because its the last thing they need to observe in order to prove that the standard model of particle physics is correct. As far as being able to use it for anything practicle; that probably won@t happen anytime soon, if ever.

It seems that whenever I read acticles about developments in theoretical physics, there are always people wanting to know how it will change their everyday lives. The quick answer is, it won`t. 99 percent of what is going on in theoretical physics has absolutely nothing to do with reality, as viewed by a normal person.

Don't worry, the end of the world will happen in Mount of Megiddo in Israel, not in Geneva, Switzerland.

Anyone who injects their opinions into the web after reading the first few lines of a journalist's description about an cutting-edge, multi-billion dollar international endeavour thinking they have even a vague idea about how things are going to pan out, let alone how the project is making huge mistake, is all of the above (and very probably more).

If you can't be bothered to research your subject matter, then keep your opinions to yourself. You're jeopardising the great work of industrious intellectuals with fear bred of ignorance and prejudice - it's such a cliché, you should really laugh at your inner chimp.

I know I am.

Those are your examples of "inconceivable threats"?

Icebergs? Of course they knew that icebergs could sink ships; what a ridiculous assertion. The Titanic had already altered course to avoid some of them before it struck the one that sunk it.

You think they didn't know Chernobyl was substandard when they built it? They ignored the threat everyone was well aware of in order to save money. Everyone with technical knowledge told them it was unsafe (unlike at the LHC where nearly everyone with that knowledge says it is safe).

9/11? For god's sake, read the Commision's report! Aside from the fact that it wasn't an accident, so isn't really comparable. Unless you believe that LHC was built with the *intent* of destroying the world.

I know it's too much to hope for that people who know nothing on a topic keep quiet about it, or maybe even (and I know this is kinda crazy) try to LEARN something about it, but I do find it absurd that readers - and authors, looking at yesterday's article - of this site (who presumably use and trust science and technology every day of their lives) would be the ones having these absurd overreactions. If science doesn't advance, neither will technology.

the world is going to implode !!!!!

smoke'm if you got em!!!

It's 15:49 GMT 1 and I'm still alive and kicking...

so much for you doomsday morons, now go cry yourself to sleep because you were wrong, science called and wants an apology.

Johnnyrico, this test isn't the main concern. People are afraid of the first complete operation of the machine. Hell, if it's going to make a black hole (Which I highly doubt it will), sweet. What a way to go. Much better than dying in my sleep.