Large Hadron Collider ‘could shrink Earth into a 300ft ball,’ expert warn

        

Maybe a black hole could form, and then suck in everything around it. The second scary possibility is that the quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed objects called strangelets. 

‘That in itself would be harmless. However under some hypotheses a strangelet could, by contagion, convert anything else it encounters into a new form of matter, transforming the entire earth in a hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across.’ thumbnail for post ID 7993822Lewis Hamilton's former grid girl killed after her BMW crashes into wall That sounds a little cramped – but wait, it could get even worse, Rees says. Rees says, ‘Empty space – what physicists call the vacuum – is more than just nothingness. It is the arena for everything that happens. It has, latent in it, all the forces and particles that govern the physical world. The present vacuum could be fragile and unstable.’ ‘Some have speculated that the concentrated energy created when particles crash together could trigger a ‘phase transition’ that would rip the fabric of space. This would be a cosmic calamity not just a terrestrial one.’ Astronomer Royal Martin Rees speaking at the memorial service for Professor Stephen Hawking, at Westminster Abbey, London. Astronomer Royal Martin Rees speaks at Stephen Hawking’s memorial service PA But the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) says that, in practice, the collider poses ‘no danger.’ The LSAG says, ‘Whatever the LHC will do, nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of the Earth and other astronomical bodies.’ Far from seeking to kill us all, the scientists at CERN hope that discoveries from the tunnels could actually change the world.