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We’re just hours away from the moment when they turn on the Large Hadron Collider… if there’s anything you really need to get done I would go ahead and do it, this could be the end of the world.

Excitement and Fear Abound Over Super Collider:

Scientists are getting ready to flip the switch on the largest science experiment ever conducted on Earth — the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.

The LHC is a 27-kilometer ring located in the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, around which high-energy protons will be smashed together in two counter-rotating beams. More than 1,000 magnets will keep the beams — each containing millions of protons — on a circular path around the collider, while hundreds more keep the beams focused. The beams will travel at almost the speed of light.

Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Some think that it could create a miniature black hole that will destroy the entire planet. That would ruin your day…

But the collider has been the subject of intense fear among the public. Public-relations staffers at the LHC are receiving a flood of worried and angry phone calls and e-mails, reported James Gillies, head of PR for the collider. Nobel prize winner Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even received death threats, according to the BBC.

Black Holes and Stranglets

“They phone me and say: “I am seriously worried. Please tell me that my children are safe,” Gillies told the BBC. “There are a number who say: ‘You are evil and dangerous and you are going to destroy the world.’” Gillies said the concerns are “nonsense,” adding, “What we are doing is enriching humanity, not putting it at risk.”

The concerns are nothing less than a total doomsday scenario. The anti-LHC hysteria was started by Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho, who filed suit in U.S. and European courts to stop the LHC. Their theory is that the LHC will produce micro black holes and “stranglets” that may not decay as rapidly as mainstream physics predicts.

“Any miniature black hole created at rest in a collider would essentially be trapped in Earth’s gravitational field, and over seconds to hours, slowly interact and acquire more mass,” Wagner says on his LHCDefense.org Web site.

If it’ll make you feel any better, my local physics expert says that the chances of that happening are “very small.” I know I’ll sleep better tonight.

If you want to learn more about the Large Haron Collider, take a look at AlpineKat’s LHC rap, yo: