Some people are nuts, and it’s amazing when you think about it that such a large amount of people in society just don’t think right. Conspiracy theories regarding astronomy have existed for a long time, like those peadbrain idiots who claimed that it was impossible to go on the moon, or others who claim that the US government have a base in the desert keeping all of the Alien stuff that we’ve found.

But this new conspiracy theory was initially started after someone filed a lawsuit against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project on March 21. The LHC project was originally designed to try and find a hypothetical Higgs Boson that would prove the Standard Model of quantum physics. However, such a particle is extermely heavy, and therefore large amounts of energy are needed to generate it (E=mc², mass and energy are equivalent), making it necessary to build such a large underground particle accelerator. The first tests should start in May 2008 after the end of its building.

This conspiracy theories, like most ones, use a mixture of “facts” and “reason” to try and convince people that the LHC will eventually blow up the world. I suggest that you watch this Youtube video which gives the information from these people’s point of view

Watch it Here

You’ll be astonished of the number of people that actually believe everything this guy says if you look at the comments at the bottom of the page. It’s really important to keep an eye on what people say and to have a minimum of critical faculties. If there was any risk, I would say that the CERN would shut down the project and evaluate the risks. The risks have been evaluated, and they are close to nil.

Here are some of the beliefs of these people, and why they are wrong:

The LHC will create Micro Black Holes that will eventually devour the Earth
According to the Standard Model, the energy that the LHC can build up is far too low in order for micro black holes to be created. For a Black Hole the size of Planck’s length (10^-35 m), approximately 10¹⁹ Giga Electron Volts (GeV) would be required, and the LHC’s maximal potential of energy creation is only 10⁴ GeV. That means that the LHC is 10¹⁵ times too small to create such a black hole.

In some extensions of the Standard Model, there are extra dimensions, and therefore a micro black hole be created.
Yes, indeed, these black holes could be created if these extensions were proved, but the conspirationists have forgotten to include a point in their reasonning: Hawking Radiation would cause these black holes to evaporate and dissappear. Furthermore, the such a multi-dimension model has never been proved and is only based on loose assumptions

Apparently, the risks of the LHC destroying human kind is of about 1 in 50 million, therefore there is absolutely no reason to freak out. But these conspirationists never have enough, do they?

The LHC could create Strangelets, and transform the Earth into a Strange Star
Indeed, if Strangelets could be created in the LHC, they would transform all of the matter on Earth into Strangelets. However, Frank Close (Physics Professor at Oxford) stated that the ‘chance of this happening is like you winning the major prize on the lottery 3 weeks in succession; the problem is that people believe it is possible to win the lottery 3 weeks in succession.’ It is in fact possible, but te chances of it are so low that there are way more chances for you of dying from suffocation on Saturn than you dying because of the LHC.