LHC dimensional apocalypse from midnight: Your thoughts

'The Doctor' writes: It should be only a 500 kiloton blast, actually

The reader known only as "Dr." started off in a similar vaguely-plausible sounding humdrum vein, writing:

"a patch of false vacuum 10 exp. -26 cm across is all the recipe demands" for the creation of a "pocket universe" which, disconnecting from our universe "in roughly 10 exp. -37 seconds," would leave behind a black hole which would evaporate (by the Hawking process of pair creation) "in roughly 10 exp. -23 seconds, releasing the energy of a 500 kiloton nuclear explosion," about 17 times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb in 1945.

But the mysterious Doctor then engaged proper Fruitcake Mode:

Something like that also appears to be predicted by Nostradamus ("Les Propheties...", Rosne, Lyon, 1557, verse IX-44) in Geneva, when a transmutation of elements is done there ("Saturn will transmute gold to iron") by that opposite to a positive ray (RAYON POSITIF, abbreviated to RAY POZ), followed by "extermination of all" ... "by secret fires, a great place will be scorched" ...

Splendid stuff. But actually it seems that everything should be OK and Geneva won't be vapourised in a titanic subterranean nuclear blast.

Up to now now the rays of positively charged protons accelerated in opposite directions ("Le contre RAY POZ") and lead nuclei have been used in accelerators and planned for the LHC, but gold nuclei have been used to make new superheavy elements. According to the prophecy IX-44, all one has to do in order to avoid this fairly local disaster in Geneva is to avoid using gold as a target as well as accelerated gold nuclei!

Phew, that's a relief. Provided that bungling LHC boffins can manage to avoid mistakenly putting gold into the Collider instead of lead or protons, it will - according to Nostradamus, anyway - not explode with a force devastating enough to destroy a city. Even so, there's at least one anonymous coward out there who's taking no chances.

Personally in circumstances like these I prefer to have my back close against several thousand meters of granite. I know they could come in from that direction but I also keep a sheet of aluminium foil handy just in case.

It's good to see the old ways being kept up.

Others pooh-poohed the notion that the LHC could possibly destroy the world. Peter McAulay chipped in, disparaging the machine's abilities.

Turning the planet into soup etc. is definitely out of the question. We need about 18 orders of magnitude more energy for that.

Petrea Mitchell asked the obvious question, saving us the effort.

And just HOW do you coincidentally happen to have just precise knowledge about planetary liquification, Mr. McAulay? Hmm?

Plainly Mr McAulay works for a secret government lab where they have long ago developed a weapon capable of turning planets into soup and are now working on a technology capable of powering it.

It was also - of course - generally felt that there was bound to be some involvement by aliens. Lee Dowling pointed out that if LHCs could cause colourful mega-scale destruction, aliens conducting similar experiments ought already to have done so, visibly.

There might be a big bang at the LHC in the conventional sense (smoke, flames, loud noise) but we're not going to be kick-starting the second Big Bang.

If we could, we'd be witnessing Big Bangs and self-created black holes all over the cosmos and they would be our primary indicator of "intelligent life" ... But if we don't at least try, we might as well have stayed in caves eating cold veggies because we had no tools to hunt or cook with.