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Is the Hadron Collider Still Going to Destroy the World?

by Terrence O'Brien on January 29, 2009 at 11:48 AM

Fox News Makes Unqualified Assertion that LHC Will Kill Us All

We thought that we had heard the last from the doom-sayers about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but of course leave it to that bastion of high-quality journalism, Fox News, to find a research paper that slightly contradicts accepted scientific assumptions about the LHC and twist them into prophecies of world-ending catastrophe.

A new study from three scientists, Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna, and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama, suggests that the initial math regarding the decay of the microscopic black holes may have been slightly off. It was originally anticipated that the tiny black holes scientists hoped to create with the LHC would decay in under a millisecond. This new study, however, suggests that they may last much longer -- possibly past the one-second mark.

Of course, the Fox News science and technology department seems to think this means that the LHC will create a black hole that will grow at an uncontrollable rate and swallow the Earth. This position, however, completely ignores the findings of the new study, which clearly states that the black holes will still decay quicker than they can accumulate mass, and will disappear safely into the atmosphere or the Earth.


Our favorite part is Fox's reaction to the study's claim that "the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible." What does FoxNews.com's Science and Technology Editor Paul Wagenseil have to say to that?
"FoxNews.com can think of a few other things that didn't seem possible once - the theory of continental drift, the fact that rocks fall from the sky, the notion that the Earth revolves around the sun, the idea that scientists could be horribly wrong."
Seriously, Paul? Are you comparing yourself to Galileo?

We think it's important to point out that Paul is not a scientist. He received a B.A. in history from University of California, Berkeley. We're not questioning Paul's intelligence, just his qualification to dismiss the research of dozens (if not hundreds) of scientists who have determined that the LHC does not pose a threat. [From: Fox News]


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Tags: fox news, FoxNews, killer gadgets, KillerGadgets, large hadron collider, LargeHadronCollider, lhc, quantum, quantum physics, QuantumPhysics, research, science

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