Safety concerns
As with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), people both inside and outside of the physics community have voiced concern that the LHC might trigger one of several theoretical disasters capable of destroying the Earth or even our entire Universe.
These include:
-Creation of a stable black hole[7]
-Creation of strange matter that is more stable than ordinary matter
-Creation of magnetic monopoles that could catalyze proton decay
-Triggering a transition into a different quantum mechanical vacuum (see False vacuum)
CERN performed a study to investigate whether such dangerous events as micro black holes, strangelets, or magnetic monopoles could occur.[8]
The report concluded, "We find no basis for any conceivable threat." If black holes are produced, they are expected to evaporate almost immediately via Hawking radiation and thus be harmless, although the existence of Hawking radiation is currently unconfirmed. Perhaps the strongest argument for the safety of colliders such as the LHC comes from the simple fact that cosmic rays of much higher energies than the LHC can produce have been bombarding the Earth, Moon and other objects in the solar system for thousands of millions of years with no such effects.
However, some people remain concerned about the safety of the LHC such as the science watchdog group called the Lifeboat Foundation which has covered these dangers in detail. As with any new and untested experiment, it is not possible to say with utter certainty what will happen. John Nelson at Birmingham University stated of RHIC that "it is astonishingly unlikely that there is any risk - but I could not prove it."[9] In academia there is some question, albeit among a minority of scientists, of whether the Hawking radiation theory is correct.[10] RHIC has been running since 2000 and has generated no major problems.
At that speed the photons might weigh as much as me or you!
