Doomsday disappointment: This simulated event depicts the decay of a much sought Higgs particle following a collision of two protons in the LHC's CMS experiment.
Credit: CERN
The new Safety Assessment Report said that any black holes produced by the collider would be "microscopic" and decay almost immediately, as they would lack the energy to grow or even be sustained.
"Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists," the authors write.
As for the hypothesised 'strangelets', the report referred to data from the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to say that these would not be produced during collisions in the LHC.
Interesting, but not worth the apocalpyse
France has also asked a French watchdog agency, the Nuclear Safety Authority, to carry out a safety appraisal of the LHC.
On August 29, the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, France, tossed out a last-ditch legal bid to stop the LHC's ignition. The suit had been filed by a group of European citizens, led by a German biochemist, Otto Roessler, of the University of Tuebingen.
"If there was a risk of destroying the world, no scientist that I know in the collaboration would turn it on," said White. "Finding out about our universe may be worth years of effort, billions of Swiss francs, long hours and night shifts, but it certainly isn't worth the apocalypse."
With AFP.
