Gizmodo pointed me to a fantastic article in New Scientist about CERN's Large Hadron Collider, set to turn on in June, and the people who think it might, accidentally, blow up the entire universe.It won't.
But it's interesting to read the worst-case scenarios. They're pretty bad.
Wagner and Sancho's court papers raise theoretical scenarios in which the LHC could create particles that gobble up the Earth, such as "killer strangelets". Strangelets are hypothetical blobs of matter containing "strange" quarks, as well as the usual "up" and "down" types that make up ordinary matter.If a strangelet were stable and negatively charged, it might begin eating the nuclei of ordinary matter, converting them into strange matter. Eventually the menacing chain reaction could assimilate our entire planet and everyone on it.
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