In Reply to: re: re: re: a useful link for the end of the world this wednesday posted by R. Fay N' The Man on September 08, 2008 at 22:51:45:

Great to see theres an interest in particle physics in castlebar.
The world wont be ending on wed, I can assure you of that.
The conditions being created will be very much like those a billionth of a second after the big bang. Incredible high energy, and we expect many interesting phenomena to occur. The idea of mini black holes being created is not completely crazy but its definitely on the speculative end of the spectrum in terms of what we expect.
The most assuring thing to remember is that these conditions are recreated every single day over earth by cosmic rays colliding with our outer atmosphere. Actually these "natural" collisions are usually of much high energy than will be attempted at the LHC. So rest assured, at CERN we are merely doing something nature does every day.

As for the black holes, they would only exist for a fraction of a second before disapearing, so chill out.

As for the possibility of strangelets destroying the earth, if that was going to happen it would have already at another accelerator RHIC.

Heres some good links
www.cern.ch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_black_hole

so thats all the scare mongering, if anyone is actually interested in why we are doing this experiment -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cp_Violation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higg%27s_boson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry