Boon or Doom as the Large Hadron Collider Spins Up?

If the end of the world begins, it will start at 12:15 AM PDT on Wednesday.

What's the issue? The possibility that the LHC could create microscopic black holes that some fear would devour the Earth. Even worse for those frightened by the LHC, the scientists involved in the project admit that the creation of microscopic black holes is possible. However, they believe that the black holes will be so unstable they will vanish almost instantly.

It's become such a worry that lawsuits have been filed in both U.S. federal court and the European Court of Human Rights. And CERN scientists have reportedly received death threats and pleas to stop the experiment.

Walter Wagner, one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit, has created a website called Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The site says:

Some experts fear that the risk of operating the LHC disproportionately outweighs anything science might gain from this experiment. It is not possible to know what the outcome of the experiment will be, but even CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) scientists concede that there is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet.

Most people know about black holes.

A strangelet is a "hypothetical object consisting of a bound state of roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks." The problem with strangelets is that theoretically a strangelet, upon coming in contact with normal matter, could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter.

What exactly are scientists looking for? Scientists plan to hunt for signs of "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up more than 96% of the universe. They also hope to finally discover the elusive Higgs boson, a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass (AKA the "God particle").

The LHC could also find evidence of other dimensions.

So here's where I throw in my pet theory. Anyone see The Mist? Yep, we find evidence of those other dimensions, open a hole up between our dimension and other, and in come those Mist-like creatures.

What's the point of my pet theory? The Mist is a science fiction story. And all the speculation about black holes and strangelets verge on science fiction.

On the other hand, if the scientists are wrong, no one will be around to read this anyway.