the sky is falling

Be afraid! Be very afraid! Those evil particle physicists are at it again with their massive high-energy colliders, and if they're not closely monitored, their high-falutin' "experiments" might put an end to the universe as we know it. This could be doomsday, people, the ultimate Apocalypse! At least that's what an average citizen might think if they happened to stumble on this little item on Slashdot, which Jen-Luc Piquant found courtesy of the mystery blogger behind Angry Physics. It resurrects the rumor of universe-destroying mini-black holes that could be created once CERN's Large Hadron Collider goes online in -- is it 2008? I haven't been keeping up with the official start date.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the item appeared on the five-year anniversary of those infamous terrorist attacks on NYC and DC. Nonetheless, the smell of fear -- or at least of fear-mongering -- was still lingering in the air as various members of the Bush administration capped off a pre-election week of stumping across the nation, telling us why we should still be absolutely terrified of innocent-seeming items like bottled water and shampoo, which MIGHT EXPLODE ANY MINUTE. However, in fairness to the White House, concerns over continuing terrorist threats are much, much more valid than the worry that the LHC will end Life As We Know It On Earth -- almost infinitely so. Terrorist attacks have actually happened, and our country is still a major target of extremist groups, so a certain degree of caution should appropriately be exercised. (I still say the whole liquids and gels ban on flights is ludicrous, however.)

Even in physics, one shouldn't dismiss a potential risk outright, particularly since the LHC will achieve unprecedented energies that will hopefully lead to exciting new physics. "New physics" implies that scientists could find something surprising, or revolutionary, which could in turn be potentially dangerous. After all, Wilhelm Roentgen never dreamed in 1898 that his newly discovered x-rays could be fatal in large doses -- the proverbial double-edged sword. But in case people have forgotten, this isn't the first time we've heard about mini-black holes being produced in colliders. Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) generated all kinds of world-ending rumors when it fired up in 1999, prompting the Sunday Times of London to print an hysterical article with the headline, "Big Bang Machine Could Destroy Earth!" Congress called for special hearings, and legend has it that one reporter called Brookhaven to ask whether RHIC had already created a black hole that swallowed the plane of John F. Kennedy Jr. as it flew past Long Island. (I would like to think this story is apocryphal, but alas, it probably isn't.)

Most of the RHIC hysteria centered not on mini-black holes, but on strangelets: an object formed should strange quarks stick around long enough after a high-energy collision to combine with up and down quarks. If a resulting strangelet had a negative charge -- an even more unlikely prospect than a strangelet forming in the first place -- it would gobble up all normal matter it encountered, until the entire universe was converted into strangelets. Aiee! Fortunately, the probability of this happening is, at best, on a par with winning the lottery not just once, but more than 10 times in a row. And that's an optimistic estimate. My favorite quote at the time was by MIT physicist Robert Jaffe, who told New York Newsday that, with regard to the formation of strangelets, it was more likely that "a spaceship is going to land in the middle of Texas, and that aliens are going to come out and tell us that the New York Yankees are all aliens."

My point is that both of these prospects have been carefully studied, in depth, by a panel of top-notch experts in the field, a mere 7 years ago, and found to be, well, fairly preposterous. Mini black holes might be a wee bit more likely than the formation of strangelets, but even if they are produced, they wouldn't pose a threat. Why is that? You might well ask. Two words: Hawking radiation. Back in the 1990s, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes can emit tiny particles of radiation, which cause them to lose mass over time, gradually winking out of existence. It's the result of virtual particle pairs popping out of the quantum vacuum near a black hole. Normally they would collide and annihilate into energy, but sometimes one of the pair gets sucked into the black hole, resulting in an apparent violation of energy conservation. The mass of the black hole must decrease slightly as a result to counter this effect and ensure that energy is still conserved. How fast it evaporates depends on the black hole's size: the smaller it is, the faster it evaporates. Ergo, even in the event the LHC produced mini black holes, they would be roughly the size of an electron, and would evaporate in mere fractions of a second.

Ultimately, the best argument against the latest "mini black holes" doomsday scenario is the same as for RHIC and its hypothetical strangelets: it hasn't happened yet in the earth's atmosphere, which is routinely bombarded by cosmic rays, and has been for billions of years, yet no evidence for strangelets or mini-black holes has been detected. Ditto for the high-energy collisions at RHIC, which has been operating for several years now. Okay, that last bit is not quite accurate: there's some debate among particle theorists about whether RHIC has produced a fireball with properties strikingly similar to a black hole. But as predicted theoretically, whatever it was proved too short-lived to pose a catastrophic risk; it wasn't even around long enough to collect much data beyond the mess of squiggly lines pictured at right.

Neither the RHIC nor the LHC doomsday scenarios are unique in modern physics history. During the years of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, there were concerns that a nuclear explosion would set the Earth's atmosphere. (Gratuitous Morpheus quote from The Matrix: "It was we who scorched the sky.") SLAC's B factory caused ripples of doomsday concerns when it came online, and there were fears in the 1990s that Fermilab's Tevatron might create a supernova instead of (or in addition to) discovering the top quark. All proved to be unfounded.

So why does this kind of irrational panic keep happening every time a major physics experiment is slated to begin? For starters, human fear isn't logical, and we're living in an age of unprecedented scientific progress, in which the public is both fascinated by, and fearful of, what science has wrought, and what it might produce in the future. It's also an era where the knowledge gap between scientists and the average person on the street could more appropriately be termed a yawning chasm. The panic stems from ignorance of the actual physics at work. Normally this would be our cue to decry, once again, the sad state of scientific literacy (or lack thereof) in this country. And we are, indeed, still concerned about this. But in fairness to the public, sometimes physicists forget what it was like not to have a PhD in the field. Consider all the science stuff people need to know just to make sense of it all.

Thanks to popular authors like Hawking and the seeping of the notion into popular culture (Futurama played with black hole physics in one memorable episode), the average citizen probably has a rudimentary grasp of black holes and the effects of extreme gravity. But they don't necessarily know about Hawking radiation, which requires a solid grasp of concepts like matter and antimatter, virtual particles, energy conservation, and energy/mass conversions, just for starters. And they don't have a good grasp of relative size scales, so a "mini black hole" might call to mind something the size of a donut, rather than a teensy subatomic particle. Nor will they appreciate the associated physical differences related to size -- like the strength of the object's gravitational pull, for instance, or the amount of energy required to produce a top quark. (The energy to make a top quark is impressive when expressed in GeVs, but extrapolate that to the macroscale, and it amounts to roughly the energy required for an adult male to perform a single pushup.)

Matters aren't much better when it comes to the inner workings of the actual facilities. The public knows (at least one hopes they do) that physicists are smashing atoms inside giant colliders, but they don't understand that producing a mini black hole -- or a top quark, Higgs boson, or hypothetical graviton, for that matter -- requires concentrating sufficient mass into very tiny spaces to reach the literally astronomical high energies needed to recreate early cosmic conditions in the lab. And even then, it would probably require that string theory be correct in its assumption that gravity isn't as weak as it seems to be, because it can seep into extra dimensions -- meaning it would be much stronger at the Planck scales at which such dimensions might exist. So now we're asking them to be conversant in basic string theory and extra-dimensional concepts as well, not to mention the notion of a Planck scale. Given the fact that there are members of the public with active brain cells who can't even remember that the earth orbits the sun, not vice versa, and it seems a lot to ask of the average nonscientist, especially if they're distracted by the season premiere of Grey's Anatomy.

I wish I had a solution to the problem, other than to echo everyone else in calling for a redoubling of our education and outreach efforts. But sometimes it seems to be a losing battle, doesn't it? Granted, it's discouraging at times, but I still say it's a war worth waging. Otherwise, think of what a less-than-scientifically-literate layperson might make of last month's breaking news about graphene: "Black Hole in a Pencil," the Science magazine headline read.

Pencils? Black holes? What could possibly be the connection? That headline gave me pause, and I'm reasonably scientifically literate. I even know a little bit about graphene, thanks to my regular attendance at certain physics conferences. (I'm hoping to write a more extensive post on the subject at some point, but I'm still muddling through the technical details.) In essence, graphene is the two-dimensional version of graphite, the stuff of pencil lead. There was some doubt as to whether this was even possible -- for it to be truly 2D it would have to be a mere atom thick, making it also highly unstable -- but Andre Geim and cohorts at the University of Manchester in the UK succeeded in creating sheets of graphene in 2004, and have been investigating this new substance further ever since.

It's pretty exciting stuff. Much has been made of the material's potential for creating ultrafast molecular-scale transistors, especially the fact that the electrons in graphene zip along at the speed of light, as if they had no mass -- contrary to special relativity, which says no object with even the tiniest bit of mass can ever exactly reach the speed of light. Geim's latest results suggest that graphene can also shoot electrons through other materials as if they were invisible, making it possible to test the so-called Klein paradox in a tabletop experiment. (You can see nifty movies of the effect here.) It's related to quantum tunneling, in which electrons can tunnel through supposedly insurmountable energy barriers. The likelihood for tunneling decreases the higher or thicker the energy barriers that are raised, and infinitely high walls should reduce those chances to zero. Oskar Klein, however, said that if particles were moving fast enough (i.e., at the speed of light), they could pass through even infinitely high barriers. It's the kind of bizarre behavior that would normally require superheavy atoms or -- ta-da! -- black holes.

Um... That's it? That's the "connection" between pencils and black holes? I understand if you feel a bit cheated, since the connection seems pretty tenuous at best. Sure, Science was attempting to find a creative, fun little angle to liven up a potentially dry topic, but in this case, it's highly misleading. They let their own cleverness impede effective communication of the essential concepts. I guarantee the average non-scientist reader would just hear "black hole" and "pencil," and react accordingly. (On the upside Jen-Luc points out that hardly anyone outside the scientific community is likely to read Science.) Blame the editors if one day, in the near future, some poor kid taking the SATs starts worrying that his Number 2 pencil could make like a black hole  at any moment, and quite possibly destroy the universe.

Comments

[Rob Knop]

a spaceship is going to land in the middle of Texas, and that aliens are going to come out and tell us that the New York Yankees are all aliens

Yeah, but would they tell us something we didn't know already?

Re: RHIC, that used to be my model for Gamma Ray Bursters, before the really firm long-hard GRB / core-collapse supernova connection because firm enough to ruin all the fun. Gamma Ray Bursters were, in my model, alien civilizations in distant galaxies turning on their heavy ion colliders and nucleating a conversion of matter in their solar system to a more stable state of strange matter, and releasing a correspondingly huge amount of energy.

(I also liked the idea that GRBs were matter and antimatter comets colliding in the Oort cloud, which went away when we knew that GRBs were at cosmological distances. Still, big explosions that have mysterious origins always make for lots of fun thinking.)

-Rob

[beajerry]

The "black hole" fear-mongering hasn't shown up on my radar, yet. But I salute posts like this for nipping such things in the bud.

[Rich]

Just a small point. It's not quite right when you say "Back in the 1990s, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes can emit tiny particles of radiation, which cause them to lose mass over time, gradually winking out of existence. " More accurately, Hawking showed that the theory of quantum fields in curved spacetime predicts such radiation. Whether or not black holes really emit radiation is going to have to wait for experimental observations to confirm or disconfirm.

[Jeremy Henty]

According to John Baez, Hawking radiation was announced in 1975 , not the 1990s.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/BlackHoles/hawking.html

[Jeremy Henty]

JO> The energy to make a top quark is impressive when expressed in GeVs, but extrapolate that to the macroscale, and it amounts to roughly the energy required for an adult male to perform a single pushup.

That's not even close.

1 pushup = 1 ass * 1g * 1 forearm ~ 100kg * 10ms^-2 * 1m ~ 1000 J

Energy of top quark ~ 178 GeV ~ 178 * 10^9 * 1.6 * 10^-19 C V ~ 3 * 10^-8 J .

Top quark mass taken from http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=04-66

Electron charge taken from http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?e

(How do you get block-quoting or italics to work in this form?)

[JenLucPiquant]

RE: Hawking radiation, I'd definitely go with John Baez' date over mine. And I used "showed" in the more theoretical sense... of course, it remains to be experimentally confirmed.

As for the energy calculation, I don't dispute Jeremy's numbers -- and I love any equation that includes reference to the relative masses of an ass and a forearm :) -- but I did rely on a couple of physicist pals for that calculating comment, because I know better than to try such things on my own at home. ALas I can't remember exactly what the critical distinction is that I left out, but there definitely is one. I think it has to do with what happens in terms of mass/energy, density, etc, when you take things down to subatomic scales. I'll check....

Have I mentioned I type these posts really late at night? :)

[Quasar9]

Hi Jen,
I think the average person know you can't fit the Sun or any other small star into a Lab.
And even if we exploded all the nuclear weapons that already exist on earth, there are a few good places you & I could still survive on earth.
But it is unfortunate that they use the term blachkole for what they hope 'not' to see at the accelerator or collider.

A bit like turning off the light at night at your place, and saying one has created NIGHT. The night is there all one has done is turn off a light, one of many million lights burning in New York.

Incidentally you know it is night all the time, it is onlt the Sun and our orbit around it that creates the illusion of day, and longer or shorter days, unless you live in the equator and you live in a world of pretty much stable 12 hour days & 12 hour nights. Yep a totally different world, on our very own much ridiculed (loved) little planet.

[Jeremy Henty]

Glad you liked the equation. I couldn't find an official ass/Kg conversion factor so I guessed. Ditto for forearm/m , though now I think about it I suppose a forearm is really a cubit so I probably could have found a reference if I'd been bothered.

Anyway, by the standards of modern theoretical physics a mere 10 orders of magnitude counts as a near miss, so there's no shame. If you want to cover it up, I have a cunning plan. I will spam all the Scienceblogs with a comment beginning "Ooh look! There's a Higgs particle". While teh Intarwebs is looking the other way you can re-edit your post so it looks as though you were really trying to calculate the cosmological constant. Then you claim a Nobel Prize on the grounds that an error of only 10^10 is way better than anyone else so far.

PS. Why aren't you on Scienceblogs? Still holding out against the Borg, or are they too intimidated by a team that talks the talk, walks the walk *and* looks cool in a beret?

PPS. If you have a good expanation of the Klein paradox I'm all ears.

[JenLucPiquant]

Are you a Blackadder fan, Jeremy? "I have a cunning plan" is one of its mantras.

I'm working on finding a good way to talk about the Klein paradox, but it's a tough one. As for Science blogs, they did ask me to join the Sciblings, and I reluctantly declined on the grounds that I didn't want to give up my personalized layout. If that constitutes "holding out against the Borg," so be it. :) But I'm a big fan of the Scibloggers. I read quite a few of them regularly, and subscribe to the combined feed to keep abreast of everything...

[Jeremy Henty]

Yes, I was referencing Blackadder. I can understand your desire to keep your distinctive look. Pharyngula never resurrected pirate mode after its assimilation. I'm a Scibloggers fan too, though I've held out against subscribing to their entire feed ... I'd never stop reading them if I did.

[Matt]

I know this doesn't fit this blog, but I'm so jazzed about this, and we've discussed it before that I thought I'd share with the interested readers of CPP.

My daughter was doing her daily reading this evening, poring over a book on the solar system that my parents gave to her for her seventh birthday. She came downstairs and read me long passages about each of the planets, and was obviously entranced. She expressed some confusion over how Uranus and Pluto were both tilted, but in different ways. So I got out a large balloon (the Sun) and lots of apples (with their cores being axes). In this way she understood that Uranus's pole is 90 degrees off of the rest of the planets and that Pluto is not orbiting in the solar plane. Her wonder was obvious and she went to bed mentioning that she might want to become an astronomer.

That's all, but I was so pumped up that I had to write.

[Louise]

Not to worry, Jennifer. If a Black Hole fell into the Earth, we would not get sucked up. It would cause Earth's core to be hot and probably generate a magnetic field. Makes you think, doesn't it?

[Andrew]

Other websites I visit have started to worry about this, with several commenters saying that scientists shouldn't do it if there's any chance it could destroy the Earth, even when the post links to an article giving the probability as ~10^(-40).

[Martin Griffiths]

I'm currently editing a feature on graphene, and it is indeed fascinating stuff, though I agree black holes in a pencil is a bit of a stretch!

I think this is a bit misleading though: "especially the fact that the electrons in graphene zip along at the speed of light, as if they had no mass -- contrary to special relativity, which says no object with even the tiniest bit of mass can ever exactly reach the speed of light".

As I understand it, the electrons (or to be precise, the quasi-particles arising from collective motion of the electrons!) behave as if they have no mass, but the effective "speed of light" for electrons in graphene is only a million metres per second. This is a three-hundredth of the actual speed of light in a vaccuum, so there's no conflict with special relativity.

I hope a copy of Physics of the Buffyverse will be winging it's way to me soon!

[Stefan Scherer]

Hi Martin, Jennifer,

thank you for mentioning this interesting story... I stumbled over the Klein paradox / black hole story in spiegel online, the web site of a German weekly. This piece was written for the general public, and I guess it was really completely unclear to the average reader as to where and how and why the black hole comes into play.

I tried to explain in my post at backreaction how I understand this story: The essential point is that using the conduction electrons in graphene, one has particles at hand which behave exactly as massless Dirac particles. Technically speaking, they just have momentum proportional to energy, or a "linear dispersion relation". The speed of these particles (more exactly, quasi particles, as Martin mentions) is, indeed, slower than the speed of light - but this is not so important here.

In the Klein paradox, the tunneling probability for Dirac particles rises if the blocking potential barrier gets as high as twice the mass of the particle, since then, particle-antiparticle pairs are created. The energy for this pair creation is taken form the strong field which corresponds to the step in the potential at the barrier.

To test this effect with real electrons, huge electric fields would be necessary. Such fields are available only in the vicinity of superheavy nuclei (the end of the existing periodic table is not enough, though), or maybe around black holes. For this reason, the Klein paradox could never be checked with ususal electrons.

Now, the conducting quasi-electrons in graphene behave as Dirac particles - so, they should exhibt the Klein paradox - and, most important, they are nearly massless. This means that the Klein paradox should occur already at moderate potential barriers, with barriers taht are esay to bring into the graphene planes. And this is exactly what the Manchester people have done. Then, they could study transmission and reflection patterns at the barrier, which correspond neatly to the Klein calculation.

The relation to the black hole is far fetched, I think. Since the Klein paradox is about pair creation, one might think there is a relation to Hawking radiation. However, I think that most physicists would agree that particle creation at horizons (like the Hawking and Unruh radiation) and particle creation in strong fields (an idea going back to Heisenberg and Euler in the 1940s, and best known in high energy and nuclear physics as the Schwinger mechanism) are conceptually different things. The only relation to black holes that I see is that charged microscopic black holes could create electric fields strong enough to display pair creation for standard electrons. The problem, as mentioned before, is that there is up to now no way to create sufficiently strong electric fields in the lab, and they may not even exist in nature, if there are no nuclei with charge numbers around 170 out there...

Best regards, Stefan

[Walter L. Wagner]

The Large Hadron Collider [LHC] at CERN might create numerous different particles that heretofore have only been theorized. Numerous peer-reviewed science articles have been published on each of these, and if you google on the term "LHC" and then the particular particle, you will find hundreds of such articles, including:

1) Higgs boson

2) Magnetic Monopole

3) Strangelet

4) Miniature Black Hole [aka nano black hole]

In 1987 I first theorized that colliders might create miniature black holes, and expressed those concerns to a few individuals. However, Hawking's formula showed that such a miniature black hole, with a mass of under 10,000,000 a.m.u., would "evaporate" in about 1 E-23 seconds, and thus would not move from its point of creation to the walls of the vacuum chamber [taking about 1 E-11 seconds travelling at 0.9999c] in time to cannibalize matter and grow larger.

In 1999, I was uncertain whether Hawking radiation would work as he proposed. If not, and if a mini black hole were created, it could potentially be disastrous. I wrote a Letter to the Editor to Scientific American [July, 1999] about that issue, and they had Frank Wilczek, who later received a Nobel Prize for his work on quarks, write a response. In the response, Frank wrote that it was not a credible scenario to believe that minature black holes could be created.

Well, since then, numerous theorists have asserted to the contrary. Google on "LHC Black Hole" for a plethora of articles on how the LHC might create miniature black holes, which those theorists believe will be harmless because of their faith in Hawking's theory of evaporation via quantum tunneling.

The idea that rare ultra-high-energy cosmic rays striking the moon [or other astronomical body] create natural miniature black holes -- and therefore it is safe to do so in the laboratory -- ignores one very fundamental difference.

In nature, if they are created, they are travelling at about 0.9999c relative to the planet that was struck, and would for example zip through the moon in about 0.1 seconds, very neutrino-like because of their ultra-tiny Schwartzschild radius, and high speed. They would likely not interact at all, or if they did, glom on to perhaps a quark or two, barely decreasing their transit momentum.

At the LHC, however, any such novel particle created would be relatively 'at rest', and be captured by Earth's gravitational field, and would repeatedly orbit through Earth, if stable and not prone to decay. If such miniature black holes don't rapidly evaporate and are produced in copious abundance [1/second by some theories], there is a much greater probability that they will interact and grow larger, compared to what occurs in nature.

There are a host of other problems with the "cosmic ray argument" posited by those who believe it is safe to create miniature black holes. This continuous oversight of obvious flaws in reasoning certaily should give one pause to consider what other oversights might be present in the theories they seek to test.

I am not without some experience in science.

In 1975 I discovered the tracks of a novel particle on a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector. "Evidence for Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole", Price et al., Physical Review Letters, August 25, 1975, Volume 35, Number 8. A magnetic monopole was first theorized in 1931 by Paul A.M. Dirac, Proceedings of the Royal Society (London), Series A 133, 60 (1931), and again in Physics Review 74, 817 (1948). While some pundits claimed that the tracks represented a doubly-fragmenting normal nucleus, the data was so far removed from that possibility that it would have been only a one-in-one-billion chance, compared to a novel particle of unknown type. The data fit perfectly with a Dirac monopole.

While I would very much love to see whether we can create a magnetic monopole in a collider, ethically I cannot currently support such because of the risks involved.

For more information, go to: www.LHCdefense.org

Regards,

Walter L. Wagner (Dr.)

[Hasanuddin]

A year ago I would have been totally in agreement with you. I remember Y2K all too well. However a lot can happen in a year.

Last June 26th I had an MIT professor make a rediculous statement in a lecture I attended. After talking to him afterward, I found that he had never heard of an alternative line of inquiry that I was questioning him on. It went home and began to write him a letter of explanation. That letter got huge. It eventually became a book, the Dominium, that I am now advancing.

Is there a possibility that LHC can create black-hole material? The answer is definitely yes. There are a number of papers that have printed on this subject. The first papers came out about ten years ago. There are even preexisting organizations fighting for a postponement of this project so that new concerns can be addressed, as well as the ones that have already defined, can be addressed: risk-evaluation-forum.org, LHCdefence.org, and LifeBoat. Papers that support this conclusion are listed on the first two sites…and there was also an article written in Nature, CERN to spew black holes, October 2, 2001.

If LHC is “successful” in generating man’s first synthetic black-hole material, is there a plan to reverse any black-hole material formed? No. The current hope by proponents of LHC is that nothing will happen that is dangerous. Is this caviler wishful thinking or equation-based prudence? Depends on who you ask—do CERN scientists have a vested interest in having the public lulled into a false sense of safety what hidden agendas to the persons asking important safety concerns have? CERN wishes to protect its $6,800,000,000 European tax-dollar investment, those asking the questions only wish to protect their families, friends, and environment.

Is there a model that suggests that LHC black-hole creations will not safely disappear? Yes, there is a new model that is being advanced that suggests that the basis of the safety assurance arguments is flawed. Debate is fierce of the Scientific American blog being used to advance discussion: http://science-community.sciam.com/blog/Hasanuddins-Blog/300005039 All are welcome, though it is advised to read the model before entering in discussion.

LHC is slated to start up this May. That is only a few more days to take action…assuming they are successful on their first try. Chances are they will not be “successful” on the first try. But as they perfect their machine’s calibrations and increase the injection of bundle size, chances increase. There is still hope that public concern could derail the project and allow for all possible safety risks fully explored.

[Ms. Scarlet]

To Hasnuddin - I'm far from an expert on this matter, but does it seem to you that CERN might also have a vested interest in NOT destroying the Earth? I think that the outcome would affect them, too, and I'm not talking about their budget.

[notepad]

35 days left.

It is possible that this Universe in 35 days does not exist anymore. And these are not esoterists these are scientists who think so.

Safety of this project should be reviewed or our Universe may be gone. Sucked up into a black hole actually.

CERN LHC will be in production mode on the 21. of May 2008

www.notepad.ch

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Only 35 days until the end of the world? Gosh, I wish I hadn't filed my taxes. I could have spent the money on one big Doomsday Splurge.