The Large Hadron Collider... be afraid.

[RustiSwordz]

The French and USA are building the worlds most powerful Particle beam accelerator in a chamber in the swiss alps.

This thing is designed to take atomically sized particles and smash them together to see the results.

Now if this thing works it will further our understanding of the universe by a thousandfold.

But...

A group of scientists are trying to stop this machine being switched on in May.

Why, simple there is a one in a billion chance that it will kill us all if it goes catastrophically wrong. In a worse case senario it could shift the local gravity causing massive earthquakes, or it could literally rip apart the space/time continuum or at worse create a black hole which would crush the lot of us in a millisecond...

sod global warming...

[richardburton]

This is the machine that's mentioned in Dan Brown's Angels & Demons I think.

[RustiSwordz]

lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080331122534.htm

www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200814/570/Injunction-sought-against-Large-Hadron-Collider

[Luperis]

I visited CERN when a couple of years ago when they were still building it as an A-level physics field trip...
We were going to be allowed to walk through the inside of the tube of the LHC as it had never been used and there was no radiation in it, but they had some building setbacks and were very busy at the time so decided to show us inside one of the smaller colliders instead. All the scientists working there were really enthusiastic and told us all about the experiments they were doing - it was pretty interesting. ^^
When we asked if there was a risk, the scientists working there seemed confident that it was totally safe. We can only hope that, as quantum physicists, astrophysisicts and mathmeticians, they know what they are doing.

[Lensman]

Actually it's a conspiracy by the scientists to rid the universe of chavs. Unfortunately it will take the rest of us with them when the Earth is blown up, but considering the benefit to the universe at large, that's a rather small price to pay, innit? ;D