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Geneva: Scientists working on the world's biggest machine are being besieged by phone calls and e-mails from people who fear the world will end this Wednesday, when the gigantic atom smasher starts up.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, where particles will begin to circulate around its 27km circumference tunnel on September 10, will recreate energies not seen since the universe was very young, when particles smash together at near the speed of light.
The machine has been shadowed by internet-fuelled concerns that it will release energies so powerful that it will create a runaway black hole that will engulf the planet, or a "strangelet" particle that would transform earth into a lump of strange matter.
Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University.
But people who fear the powerful atom-smashing machine will cause Earth to be gobbled up or reduced to grey goo can rest assured, according to a study released on Thursday.
"Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth - and the planet still exists," the study said. The assessment is written by five physicists at LHC's operator, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.
Despite the assurances, the head of public relations, James Gillies, said he gets tearful phone calls, pleading for the £4.5 billion machine to stop. There have also been legal attempts to halt the start up.
The LHC, installed in a tunnel on the French-Swiss border, is to start unleashing a beam of protons in the first stage of its commissioning process.
The experiment aims to resolve some of the biggest questions in physics, such as the nature of mass, the weakness of gravity and whether, as some theoreticians suggest, there exist dimensions beyond our own.
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