That's quite simply the most beautiful thing I've ever seen!

The comment about the failure situation is incorrect. Any black hole created by the LHC would "evaporate" via hawking radiation before doing any damage. Devouring the earth would require the black hole to have enough initial mass to last the few seconds required to get to more matter.

@live telivision You're no doubt right, but wouldn't it be in keeping with the human experience that just such a fluke "It couldn't happen in a million years" actually did occur, maybe because of some facts we don't as yet understand about the nature of black holes? Isn't it that why we're doing this thing, to find out more about how the universe works? We haven't seen a black hole yet, what do we know about the conditions required to build one?

Not to say I'm against scientific discovery, far from it. And if we did perchance managed to devour the earth, wouldn't that be a hoot :), what would be lost? An insignificant dirt ball with some inhabitants thinking themselves to be the main attraction.

Fire it up, already! I want me some collisions.

If this thing can create a black hole ... then they shouldn't play with it.

"Hawking radiation" is currently a theoretical concept. It would really be a stupid move to contradict Hawking by destroying Earth & the solar system.

If Hawking radiation doesn't exist how the f**k are they going to "evaporate" a black whole ? (even a very small one).

There should be a backup plan. As it is now there is no backup plan, so they shouldn't do it.

I think it would be completed in 2012! the first test run would be done on December 12 , 2012.

anyway , sangoku will save the earth.

This is CMS experiment, not ATLAS, you can see it by the colors: CMS is red and yellow, ATLAS is black and blue. :)

All this conjecture about black hole blah blah does one thing: it underlines humans' inability at proper risk assessment.

The statement should clearly have been: " Personally, I'm glad they’re spending a bit of extra time to get everything perfect, since one theoretical failure situation could lead to major damage to the system costing us *huge* amounts of money, if not scrapping the entire project."

The black hole concept is fallacious in several ways: it's highly unlikely that something manmade is a cosmic 'first post'. If the universe was so unstable as to allow haphazard formations of blackholes that sucked existence out of existence, then cosmic rays would have surely produced such a thing in the 4 billions of years that the earth has existed.

All of this aside, Hawking radiation is not a 'theory' in that someone (Hawking) took a guess at what the universe is like, and we haven't disproved it yet.

It is a theory that is indirectly supported by our entire experience. Yes, we haven't had the change to fondle a black hole at close distances yet, but that doesn't mean that our understanding of day to day events (like transistors and superconductors) is unable to give us a firm theoretical understanding of quantum theory - which has, I must add, so far not been contradicted by *any* observable phenomenon.

And a final PS: if the black hole were to occur, it would be quickly over. You wouldn't have Hollywood style panic. So rein in the fear.

"If Hawking radiation doesn't exist how the f**k are they going to "evaporate" a black whole ? (even a very small one)."

They'd place Paris Hilton and Bill 0'Reilly in it, which would reverse the event horizon, because two black holes of suckage cannot exist next to each other.

That chick is pretty cute...I wouldn't mind using my accelerator on her;)