CERN – the Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire – the same organization where the World Wide Web was born, is about to start testing the Large Hadron Collider in an effort to recreate conditions after the Big Bang.

However there are those who fear that the experiment could destroy the world and have filed lawsuits to prevent the activation of the device.

The device is designed to replicate conditions that existed just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and its creators hope it will unlock the secrets of how the universe began.

However, opponents fear the machine, which will smash pieces of atoms together at high speed and generate temperatures of more than a trillion degrees centigrade, may create a mini-black hole that could tear the earth apart.

Does this remind anyone of this dialogue from Ghostbusters?

Dr. Egon Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

So if you’re reading this next week, the experiment has been so far successful. But if not, apparently the black holes were a bigger problem than the researchers anticipated, but at least we were first with the news.

h/t Secular Blasphemy, who lives in Norway, which is a lot closer to the collider, so if there are any problems maybe he could send out a warning e-mail.

UPDATE via Instapundit: An item about debunking the doomsday scenarios.

Several rounds of scientific studies, considering increasingly outlandish scenarios, have ruled out the black-hole threat. The evidence shows that the collider is absolutely safe, and poses no chance of cosmic catastrophe. Nevertheless, the hysteria continues: Part of the reason for that is that scientists say it’s conceivable that a less threatening breed of subatomic black holes could be created. But another factor is that there’s so much science-fiction appeal to the tale of the black hole that ate the earth.

But this is also fascinating:

Speaking of time travel, Cramer has been in the midst of a real-life experiment in retrocausality – a kind of backward flow of information from the future to the past. I first wrote about this experiment almost two years ago, and Cramer recently told me that he’s still trying to get the apparatus to work. Perhaps what Stephen Hawking said is true: Nature abhors a time machine.

And if Cramer’s successful he’ll write an article about it last week!

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.