Official News page 7

REAL LIFE NEWS: WE'RE STILL HERE

by Hazed

If you are reading this, then I guess the world did not come to an end. Not that I really thought it would, but there are a few scientists that were worried...

Why? It's all the fault of the world's largest particle accelerator, which has been built on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider cost $8 billion and took 14 years to build, and is now ready to go. Its official launch will happen on September 10, the machine's official start-up date, but this weekend it's going to switched on for testing purposes.

So why is this a threat to the world? Well, it's not, but that didn't stop three people from launching a court case to get the project shut down because of the risk. These loonies came up with three possible 'doomsday' scenarios that might happen if the LHC becomes operational:

• the creation of microscopic black holes which would grow and swallow matter
• the creation of strangelets which, if they touch other matter, would convert that matter into strangelets
• the creation of magnetic monopoles which could start a chain reaction and convert atoms to other forms of matter.

Their case was thrown out of court, but now the LHC has actually been switched on, we can all be sure they were wrong. Phew!

You can read more about the testing of the LHC and see some insanely beautiful photos of this massive project. Sometimes, big science really is awesome.

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