Update Sept 9, 2008: Doomsayers are watching too much TV. Doomsayers sent death threats to MIT professor, see MIT physicist gets death threats over collider (Boston Globe). If these doomsayers would have lived in the year 1539 or so, they would have tried to kill Nicolaus Copernicus. Let’s continue moving forward with scientific understanding of our Universe.
 
Update Sept 12, 2008: A 16 year-old girl committed suicide because of all the stupid predictions by doomsayers; all you doomsayers are responsible for creating fear, doubt and uncertainty, that led to this; shame of you. See Girl Commits Suicide Over LHC Doomsday Predictions.
 
Update Sept 19, 2008: See Brian Cox: An inside tour of the world’s biggest supercollider (TED Talk; thanks to Jason Delport for the link)

There is a very good article, the DOOMSDAY FEARS SPARK LAWSUIT (Cosmic Log) that covers the recent efforts to stop the Large Hadron particle super collider from going online, due to fears that it might cause a doomsday scenario.

The builders of the world’s biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.

Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe’s CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there’s no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes.

And more incredible is:

The current lawsuit could well be decided not by scientific arguments but rather by narrower regulatory issues.

Regulatory issues? That’s stupid and illogical. What are the chances of getting the Earth destroyed due to anti-matter annihilating the Earth? I’m no physicist, but I’ll bet that it’s next to zero. We just don’t know how to generate such tremendous power for long-enough time to annihilate Earth.

Don’t stop scientific progress, there is so much to learn about our Universe.

See STUDY OF POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS EVENTS DURING HEAVY-ION COLLISIONS AT THE LHC: REPORT OF THE LHC SAFETY STUDY GROUP (PDF).

ceo