...to think the CERN scientists might have ASKED us FIRST?

[BEAUTlFUL]

Grr! So the first experiment went OK, no black holes. Another go this afternoon, sending protons round in the opposite direction. And in a couple of weeks, they'll attempt to recreate the Big Bang by sending two beams of protons round in opposite directions to smash into each other at full speed.

Um... Or how about, they don't.

It seems to me this is a bit pointless: it'll either do nothing, or it'll do something massive which might kill everyone.

Did we not have a say? Surely I weouldn't be allowed to set off a nuclear bomb in my caravan "to see what might happen", so how come scientists are allowed to do something that might be incredibly destructive?

I have a shaky grasp on science (it clashed with Art at school), and I am prone to compulsive worrying, but even so. Did I miss a vote? Did the UN send out "Do you think it's OK if boffins try to recreate the Big Bag in real life?" questionnaire and I missed it cos I was Mumsnetting?

AIBU?

I feel soothed! I know lots of you are with my lack of understanding on this subject, but that's why I posted about it; this is a subject on which loads of you are clued up and knowledgable, and I'm not.

Thank you.

Expatkat - yes. Suddenly everyone has an opinion - on physics!

My personal favourite is the "world will be destroyed in a week, slowly eaten up by black hole" claim.

If someone (or a planet) were to cross the event horizon of a black hole, annihilation would be instant - there would be so much difference between gravitational pull between head and feet that he would be torn apart instantly.

Assuming anyone reading this cares, this is why nobody is seriously thinking we can travel through a black hole, although theoretically they could connect two far away points in space (all mass bends space, and black holes are so heavy/dense that they are thought to fold space onto itself), like a tunnel, called the "Einstein-Rosen Bridge".

Has nobody here read Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History Of Time', or anything else published in the two decades that passed since then?

We bought the Brief History of Time to read on a v long flight. Didn't get far. Apparently it is the most left-on-planes book ever.

I think that it is fantastic that people are talking about Physics!

I put on BBC Breakfast during form time today for my own benefit, and I had 12 11-year old girls huddled around the TV - staring at a boring control room but completely mesmerised.

CoteDAzur: these are micro black holes - not a full collapsed star, the event horizon would actually be quite small. The science fiction novel Singularity by Bill deSmedt, while I didn't enjoy the story much, describes the science behind micro black holes quite well and I know he did a lot of research with top physicists checking his science along every step of the way.

I've found all the media hysteria really irritating, and I am no scientist. With all this nonsense about scientists risking blowing us up - can we just compare the odds for a minute of the CERN experiments developing into a world catastrophe, with those of something going wrong every day at a nuclear reactor, or the risk of nuclear bombs? We've lived with that for a long time.

At least, from what I can gather, these experiments have a constructive aim.

RubberDuck - My understanding is that the 'micro black hole' that might be created in LHC is a 'black hole' only because it could have a singularity where rules of physics break down, time stands still, etc. It will not be a 'real' black hole with the associated powers of gravitational attraction, because a couple of colliding protons will have nowhere near the mass necessary for that.

And it will be very unstable, breaking down almost immediately, possibly giving off anti-matter particle radiation. That is what I remember from "A brief history of time" (read 20 years ago), anyway.

"something going wrong every day at a nuclear reactor"

The ODDS of something going wrong - prob should have said the risk of something going wrong ANY day, not every day.

See, I said I was no scientist...

It's all beyond me (failed grade 10 physics), it did worry me a bit yesterday when they said one of the possible side-effects was the destruction of the world...