Will the World Really End on Wednesday?

The Big Bang Machine

Europeans switch on the ‘Big Bang Machine’.

Scientists on the French/Swiss border are about to embark on a mammoth experiment which sceptics say could spell the end of the world.

The particle accelerator experiment, due to be launched on Wednesday, September 10^th, is hoped to reveal amazing new secrets about the birth of our universe, allowing us to understand more about how we came to be by smashing particles into one another in what can almost be described as a re-enactment of the ‘Big Bang’.

However, those opposed to the test say there’s every chance that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), also informally known as ‘The Big Bang Machine’, the device at the centre of all this, could effectively bring about a rather unwelcome apocalypse.

A small-yet-vocal minority of pessimists worry that the experiment isn’t completely safe, and that the LHC could potentially spew out the odd micro black hole with the potential to swallow the earth.

But is this likely?

Not according to CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research), the folk behind this apocalyptic experiment, who claim that any black holes which may accidentally slip out will ‘evaporate quickly and harmlessly’.

“”Much higher energy collisions than those at the LHC occur in nature, because cosmic ray particles zip around our galaxy at close to the speed of light,” said a CERN spokesman recently. “The moon has undergone such collisions for five billion years without being devoured by a ravenous black hole or killer strangelet.”

Yet not everyone is convinced when it comes to the Big Bang Machine’s safety, so much so that two men filed lawsuits against CERN earlier this year in an attempt to thwart the experiment.

Needless to say, they can’t have been all that successful, and as it is, those European scientists are all set to flick the switch on the potentially doom-bringing earth-eater this coming Wednesday.

And whilst this writer can’t say for certain whether we will all be swallowed up come mid-week, there really is only one way to know for sure.

If you’re reading this article on Thursday, then chances are we survived.