May 28, 2009, 11:25 am
It’s been the better part of a year since the Large Hadron Collider ‚Äî the massive particle accelerator operated by the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) ‚Äî was in the headlines, and even then it wasn’t good news. The LHC has suffered from everything from poor craftsmanship to hackers to death threats from a paranoid populace ‚Äî but it looks like the Device of Doom or Discovery will be back online and launching us into the future, or oblivion, by the time Santa makes his annual appearance.
The LHC ‚Äî which runs Linux as at least a portion of its operating systems ‚Äî courted controversy for most of last year, much of it focused on the predictions of a minority of ‚Äî rogue? ‚Äî scientists who claim the device could spawn black holes which would subsequently destroy the Earth. Though multiple safety reviews have been conducted, and luminaries including Lord Rees, Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society and Stephen Hawking ‚Äî surely the world’s leading expert on black holes ‚Äî have ruled such a scenario astronomically improbable, protests and legal challenges have been mounted in both Europe and the United States…
