For all I know it is just spin, but the news this week is that the LHC couldn’t possibly cause a doomsday in 2012 – it will be shut down for repairs.

In September 2008, just 9 days after physicists first circulated protons through the 27-kilometer-long subterranean accelerator, the LHC suffered a catastrophic failure when one of those connections melted. After 14 months of repairs, CERN officials decided to limit the accelerator to half-energy to protect the connections and to shut down to repair them as soon as the LHC had produced a sizable data set, which should be by the end of next year.

Looks like 2013 will be the earliest that we will see the LHC operating at 100% capacity. Fingers crossed for that!

The underlying fear of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is that it is too experimental for any scientist to truly understand the risks.

Originally we were told that it was impossible for black holes (that could gobble up the entire planet) to be created, because they “would decay before they got the chance to do any damage”.

This has been updated to:

“the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible.”

“the expected decay times are much longer (and possibly ≫ 1 sec) than is typically predicted by other models”

By “other models” this scientist is referring to his own previous study which announced that a black hole could not last longer than one second. I find it disturbing that the language used to describe the safety has changed slightly, has become less iron-clad.