A little knowledge is a dangerous thing….

This week the European Large Hadron Collider (LHC) goes into operation. The Large Hadron Collider will become the world’s largest “atom smasher”, sending beams of protons at close to light speed both ways around a 27 km ring buried hundreds of meters under the French-Swiss boarder area before finally steering them into a head-on collision. The resulting collisions will, it is hoped, produce in miniature the conditions that existed just fractions of a second after the “big bang”, and perhaps even detect the elusive “Higg’s Boson”, a key sub-atomic particle predicted but not yet detected.

Now what I find interesting is that there is a small but very vocal fringe of people who have been spreading the story that the LHC may produce miniature “black holes” that will swallow the earth, and who have been spreading panic among some people. Of course these people aren’t physicists, or even scientists. But they have read just enough popular science to find a few out-on-context quotations that seem to support their position, and they are running (and even selling books) with this misinformation.

In fact cosmic rays hitting the earth’s atmosphere every day produce more energetic collisions than the LHC can manage, so if such collisions were going to produce earth-destroying black holes then they would have done so long ago. Non-scientists have a very poor grasp of how puny our human efforts are compared to what nature does all around us every day. Even the awesome power of a human-made nuclear weapon is dwarfed by the energy in a common thunderstorm (though the thunderstorm doesn’t release it all at once the way a bomb does).

There are real things to worry about – such as what food additives and the chemicals leaching from all our plastic containers are doing to us, or what global warming will eventually do to the world’s food supply – but earth-swallowing black holes from the LHC aren’t among them. It just goes to show how dangerous a little knowledge can be.