What's the Worst That Can Happen?

"What's the worst that can happen?"

"Oh, I don't know, maybe it'll create a black hole that will devour our planet."

Does that sound like bad science fiction? It's not.

Scientists disagree about what will happen when the world's largest atom-smasher fires up for the first time. Most think that it's perfectly safe and may give an indication of what conditions were present at the time the universe was created. A few men of science, however, believe that the process will create tiny black holes that will grow increasingly larger as they consume the Earth. These men even tried to get a court order to stop the experiment from going forward! You can read more about the whole, uh, shaBANG, here.

A tip of the brainiac covering to Jeff Parker for the original link and who made me laugh out loud with his conclusion to the line: "What if every black hole in the universe was originally a planet where the last words uttered were..."