I like this part
Then there’s the matter of black holes.
Harvey Newman, a Caltech physicist who was one of the discoverers of the gluon and is leader of the U.S. contingent on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, said the collider could theoretically produce a mini-black hole by packing a tremendous amount of energy into a tiny space.
But he said the black hole would pose no threat because it would last only 10 to the minus-27th power seconds before decaying – hardly enough time to start gobbling up the French countryside.
Critics are not convinced. Just last month, Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho filed suit in U.S. District Court in Honolulu to block the start-up of the new collider until CERN produces a comprehensive safety report.
Speaking from Hawaii, Wagner said that despite assurances from scientists at CERN and around the world, there was no proof a mini-black hole would disappear. No one has ever seen it happen, said Wagner, who studied cosmic ray physics at UC Berkeley as a young man.
It’s just as possible that the tiny black hole would be stable and start chewing up normal matter, he said.
It could take years for it to become large enough to gobble up the Earth, but there’s no evidence that can’t happen, he said.