LARGE HADRON COLLIDER NOT A DOOMSDAY MACHINE
Dr. Jeffrey Zweerink
Earth’s imminent demise looms as scientists fire up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator yet built. So argue a handful of scientists who claim that the LHC will produce black holes that will destroy Earth from the inside out. The same claim was leveled against another accelerator (the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider or RHIC) before it turned on nearly a decade ago. After eight years of operation Earth shows no signs of destruction, and we expect the same results after years of LHC operation.
Part of what fuels the doomsday scenarios is the enormous energies achieved in the particle collisions produced by these machines. Most people don’t realize that nature continually produces particle collisions with even higher energies. In fact, the energies of these naturally occurring collisions exceed those produced in particle accelerators by a factor of one million. Yet Earth remains unscathed despite this continual bath of high-energy cosmic-rays.
See the whole article here.
http://www.reasons.org/resources/in_..._machine.shtml
For some additional layman info on the Large Hadron Collider:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/WhyLHC-en.html