There are only a few things in life which keep me awake at night, the sheets twisted cruelly about my legs and have me lying in a cold sweat, breathing heavily. [omitted -ed]...the other is the Large Hadron Collider lying 
quietly underneath the Swiss-French border. This thing is utterly massive. It is pretty much a demolition derby for sub-atomic particles. There's over 1,200 dipole magnets to make sure the particle beams maintain their trajectory around the 27 km circumferential path. An additional 392 quadrupole magnets focus the beams as well. The real players are the 1,600+ superconductor magnets which weigh up to 27 tonnes each and need to be kept at 1.9 Kelvin (oh, a crisp -456.25 F). This requires some 90 tonnes of liquid helium. How fast does this thing get particle moving? About 99.9999991% the speed of light (what, I gotta convert that for you too? Fine - that's 186,000 miles per second).
quietly underneath the Swiss-French border. This thing is utterly massive. It is pretty much a demolition derby for sub-atomic particles. There's over 1,200 dipole magnets to make sure the particle beams maintain their trajectory around the 27 km circumferential path. An additional 392 quadrupole magnets focus the beams as well. The real players are the 1,600+ superconductor magnets which weigh up to 27 tonnes each and need to be kept at 1.9 Kelvin (oh, a crisp -456.25 F). This requires some 90 tonnes of liquid helium. How fast does this thing get particle moving? About 99.9999991% the speed of light (what, I gotta convert that for you too? Fine - that's 186,000 miles per second).
So why should this make middle America get off their tractors and pay attention to scientists for a change? If the whole facility exploded right now, only a small part of France and Switzerland would be destroyed, which would surely make a great "after the commercial br
eak" story for a slow news day. Well, one of the theoretical results of all this careless atom-smashing lunacy would be a our very own black hole. Slowly, one particle at a time (old school torture-style) , growing exponentially faster, the black hole would begin to pull the magnets, thick concrete walls, and eventually the whole facility deep into oblivion. Next, France and Switzerland, oh no! Then somewhere between 4 and a half to 7 minutes after the lever is pulled, the entire earth from Roosevelt's gaping maw on Mount Rushmore to the obnoxious Pomeranian next door would be crushed into a singularity. Don't like crowded public transportation? You really won't like the singularity. The good news is you will probably burst into a cloud of fluid resulting from the vacuum created, but there's the optimist in me talking. Could this happen? Yes, of course, though the odds are really high for "not going to happen." I'm still scared, we should call a scientist.
eak" story for a slow news day. Well, one of the theoretical results of all this careless atom-smashing lunacy would be a our very own black hole. Slowly, one particle at a time (old school torture-style) , growing exponentially faster, the black hole would begin to pull the magnets, thick concrete walls, and eventually the whole facility deep into oblivion. Next, France and Switzerland, oh no! Then somewhere between 4 and a half to 7 minutes after the lever is pulled, the entire earth from Roosevelt's gaping maw on Mount Rushmore to the obnoxious Pomeranian next door would be crushed into a singularity. Don't like crowded public transportation? You really won't like the singularity. The good news is you will probably burst into a cloud of fluid resulting from the vacuum created, but there's the optimist in me talking. Could this happen? Yes, of course, though the odds are really high for "not going to happen." I'm still scared, we should call a scientist. 
Enter Dr. Lyn Evans. Back in March, you see, there was an accident at, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or CERN, the group in charge of the various test facilities in question. Dr. Evans, the main brain at CERN, described an explosion that tossed a 20 ton magnet like a cupcake off of its mountings. Evans told the reporters, "There was a hell of a bang, the tunnel housing the machine filled with helium and dust and we had to call in the fire brigade to evacuate the place," he said. "The people working on the test were frightened to death but they were all in a safe place so no-one was hurt." After an investigation, the explosion seemed to be caused by a "math flaw." I guess that few thousand scientists from across the globe decided to play it cool during the exam and have the only working TI-89 plus graphing calculator run out of batteries mid-way through. Evans and company are the same guys telling the normal people who don't have multiple physics degrees not to be "frightened to death" of their giant scientastic crusha-ma-jig. The jovial Welshman shoots down apocolyptic claims from various paranoid scientists in a fashionable way--quite literally, he is so relaxed, he says, that he wears shorts to work. The LHC is scheduled to be back in business in summer of 2009. So could this 63 year old ruddy-cheeked charmer really bring the world to an end? The likelihood is low, but the threat of annihilation by sub-atomic particle tests is far too intriguing to pass by. We here at Empires really don't care how many Higgins Bosons he finds, we find him officially on our list.
Further Reading:
Wiki LHC
Dr. Lyn Evans: Destroyer of the World
France Builds a Doomsday Machine
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