Still here
I’m not talking just about me, but the world in general. As of now, the world has not been sucked into a black hole, created by the CERN experiment that commenced operations in Switzerland a few days ago. One of the fears held by some people was that the experiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which basically fires beams of atoms around in opposite directions and smashes them into each other with the aim being to see what comes out of the atomic particles when they are smashed, would generate so much energy that mini black holes would be formed which might suck the Earth into them.
Well, that hasn’t happened so far. But that didn’t help a girl in India who apparently committed suicide due to fears about the world ending. She jumped the gun, so to speak …. should have waited to see what happened first. Also, as posed by this article, why would she choose to die painfully by drinking pesticide, versus being painlessly vapourised in a black hole.
As for what the LHC is, and what it is supposed to prove for its price tag of $10 billion, here is a useful summary.
September 13th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
I can’t believe how some people panic at the slightest mention of science.
I knew someone who wouldn’t use a microwave oven, because she was afraid of the “radiation”. I don’t think she believed me when I said that you get bathed in “radiation” by switching on a light globe… or even stepping into sunlight.
And then there was the panic before the first atomic bomb was tested: “it could ignite all the oxygen in the atmosphere… all the air in the world would explode in a giant fireball”… of course it didn’t happen.
These panic merchants watch too many science horror movies, and slept through too many science classes at school!
September 14th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
What scares me about these kinds of experiments is that they perform them in full awareness that they can’t predict the outcome. This was also the case with the first atomic bomb test CA mentioned. It wasn’t just crazy media making doomsday predictions - the scientists themselves didn’t know what the result would be. I hate the fact that scientists only care about what they can do and never stop to think whether they should do it or not. And it’s not just these big events either. I hate that they can genetically modify our food without even telling us. Scientists have no ethics and then congratulate themselves for it, because it’s all in the name of Science. They don’t even recognise how they turn this stuff into their own wacky religion. When they finally do create a black hole I hope they’re standing next to it at the time, and that someone figures out how to shut it down just after they are sucked in.
/rant