With chunks of ice the size of continents breaking off from Antarctica; the mass deaths of and disappearance of first frogs, then bees and now bats; the on-going proof of global warming; with leaders like Ahmadinejad from Iran threatening Israel with destruction and Kim Jong-il telling South Korea it would be turned into a sea of ashes, and President George Bush musing about World War Three; when Ronald Weinland, says 2008 will be the beginning of the end of time and the Mayan Calendar ending abruptly in 2012, it could be that the end of time is on it’s way but when I read an article in the New York Times, about two guys suing the European Center of Nuclear Research, or CERN, I was overwhelmed. My mind did somersaults trying to determine if this is really the end of the world. Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho are suing trying to stop the turning on this summer of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland that has cost $8 billion dollars and taken 14 years to build. The Collider will fire protons and create conditions that were last seen after the Big Bang, that’s the beginning of all things, although I still don’t know what was before the beginning? The duo believes CERN hasn’t done enough to ensure the safety of the world. They believe that the Collider could create a black hole that could eat the earth or it could create a “strangelet” that would turn the earth into a shrunken dense lump of something called “strange matter”. Yes, this is a very strange matter indeed and especially strange because none of the scientists in the article could categorically say these things won’t happen. Even Stephen Hawking’s, the modern day Einstein, says that if a black hole was created it would probably evaporate. “Probably” and “maybe” are the key words from most scientists about the subject. There has been two safety reports that have said the project is safe and a third one on its way. Dr. Arkani-Hamad of CERN commented that the earth ending concerns have “no merit”. But then he prefaces that with a comment that Quantum Physics has a dice throwing nature to it and it is just as probable the Collider “might make dragons that might eat us”. To tell you the truth no one knows what is going to happen when they start up the Collider and fires up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together, but if it does create a black hole that will eat the earth it seems to me this end of the world scenario isn’t as bad as the other ones going around these days and actually with all the ills in the world after eating the earth it might just spit it back out…
