Big bangs and black holes: Why the world didn’t end on 10th September 2008

NOTE: This article is for normal people, not scientists. The asterisks (stars) point to more scientific footnotes if you’re interested.

You may have heard on TV (September 2008) about a large science experiment happening deep underground in a large tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border. You’ve probably been told that the purpose of the experiment is to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang (the moment when the Universe is thought to have come into existence), and you might have heard about the possibility of tiny black holes (micro black holes) and other dangerous phenomena being created by the machine the scientists have built.

This machine is called the Large Hadron Collider or LHC, and in this article I would like to explain very clearly and in the simplest possible terms, one simple fact:

The LHC poses absolutely no risk to the existence of Geneva, planet Earth, humanity or the Universe.