That's all fine and good but WHAT ABOUT THAT BLACK HOLE?

What, me worry?! You betcha. However, the very fact that you are reading this post means that the world has not been swallowed up by a globe-gobbling black hole. Yet. But that is only because CERN's Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator won't start colliding anything until next month.

As you may have already read, this morning scientists at CERN (which stands for European Organization for Nuclear Research -- it's French, OK?) switched on their newest toy, the $10 billion "Big Bang Machine," "the biggest, most expensive science machine on earth," according to reports.

As reported in an article by MSNBC science editor Alan Boyle today, "former CERN chief Luciano Maiani noted that the money spent on the project over 14 years was a mere fraction of the $40 billion that China spent for this summer's Olympic Games in Beijing. 'These are the Olympics of science," CERN spokeswoman Paola Catapano replied during a Webcast interview.'"

Well, that just makes it all better, doesn't it? No, it does not.

While I will not deny the cool factor of beaming protons around a 17-mile underground racetrack at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light and then slamming them together to recreate the Big Bang (and hopefully find the elusive Higgs boson), isn't there a better way -- make that a million better ways -- for scientists to spend $10 billion dollars than to try to blow up things?

And then there is the matter of those pesky little globe-gobbling black holes.

Per Boyle's article from September 9, CERN theoretical physicist John Ellis thinks it would be "extremely exciting if the LHC did produce black holes."

I, however, have a slightly different definition of "exciting," but let us hear what Dr. Ellis had to say.

"OK, so some people are going to say, 'Black holes? Those big things eating up stars?' [Like me!!!] No. These are microscopic, tiny little black holes. And they’re extremely unstable. They would disappear almost as soon as they were produced."

Or not.

According to one Walter Wagner, a plaintiff involved in a federal lawsuit to shut down the Large Hadron Collider, the mini-singularities (that is, black holes) produced by the Large Hadron Collider (which is located on, or really under, the border of France and Switzerland) could fall to the center of the earth, grow larger, and swallow more and more of Earth's matter until all the bloggers (and everyone and everything else, including Alaska) have been sucked into its maw.

But for now, scientists, journalists, and dignitaries over there in France (okay, Geneva, Switzerland) are sipping Champagne and sucking on each others toes, toasting to a bunch of invisible particles, pretending the end is not near. As for me, I'm off to smash me some Cheerios together in a bowl of milk.

UPDATED AT 11:00 AM: Still confused? Watch this:



Those wacky CERN scientists! To the L, to the H, to the C!