It was safe to go back in the
Large Hadron Collider...IN THE weeks before Trinity, the first test of an atomic bomb, some of the physicists in the Manhattan Project fretted that their brainchild might set off a reaction that would burn up the Earth's atmosphere.
Similarly, an experiment carried out in Long Island a few years ago, which was intended to produce a form of matter known as strange quarks, caused a few imaginative worrywarts to fear that the entire planet would be converted into subatomic particles called strangelets.
Damn... that last one slipped right past me. I thought
"strangelets" were the nerdy leftbots that keep showing up at Scott Tribe's pinko picnics.
Neither of these things came to pass, of course. But that does not stop people continuing to worry that esoteric phenomena at the edge of physics might spell "The End Of Everything" in a satisfyingly B-movieish cataclysm.
(
h/t reader bob)
