All kinds of crazy

There's nothing like a sublimely over the top scientific experiment to bring the doomsayers out of the woodwork ...

Yours truly got interviewed on Friday by the BBC News website, which is doing a feature about why we're obsessed by the end of the world. I can only compliment the reporter concerned for him tracking me down, though to be fair my name's all over the internet like a rash ...

Anyways, the 'angle' behind the story is the many scare stories about the switching on of the massive Large Hadron Collider near Geneva this week, the operators of which saw off a legal attempt to stop it in the European Court of Human Rights. A group of scientists, headed by Professor Otto Rössler, a German chemist at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, had applied for an injunction to stop the collider being switched on because they feared that rather than reveal the secrets of the universe, the machine would actually either create mini black holes that would swallow the Earth 'within 50 months' or splurge exotic killer particles everywhere.

Now, I'm excited about the scientific possibilities as anyone but what's really got my attention is the huge kinds of crazy this experiement has drawn from the EotW community, a small sample of which can be viewed in the comments on the New Scientist's blog about why the collider won't suck us all into a black hole.

What's interesting to note is that although the collider is being switched on, it's not being switched on to FULL power. That's a few months down the road. Will be interesting to watch the doomsayers once nothing happens in the next few days - will they, in the main, leave the issue alone and switch back to 2012 or will they eagerly watch for the date of when the collider goes to full strength? Should be fun ...