Will we be around on September 11th?

These LHC [Large Hadron Collider] opponents fear that the Earth could be destroyed by vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles, microscopic black holes, or strangelets produced by the high-energy proton-proton collisions planned by CERN physicists. Vacuum bubbles have been described as a kind of "cosmic cancer." If it turns out that there is a lower energy state into which the universe could settle, then the LHC might produce "bubbles" of such a state which would then expand, ripping apart the Earth and eventually the entire universe. If magnetic monopoles were produced they might induce protons to decay and thus destroy normal matter. Microscopic black holes might grow by gobbling up the Earth. And strangelets are combinations of quarks that theoretically interact with normal matter and transform it into strange matter.

That was Ronald Bailey reporting on the scheduled switching on of the collider on September 10th. Bailey goes on to write, the empirical evidence is that the universe has been running trillions of these high-energy physics "experiments" for billions of years without disastrous results. In fact, Ord's colleagues Nick Bostrom and Max Tegmark from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculate that the empirical evidence suggests a conservative estimate of the annual risk that LHC-like experiments would destroy the earth is 1-in-a-trillion. At the end of his talk, Mangano reminded the Oxford conferees, "Jeopardizing the future of scientific research would be a global catastrophe." Any theory, model, or calculation that suggests otherwise is clearly flawed.

In other words, don't party like it is the end of the world. Interested in understanding how the LHC works? Click here.

The horrible thing is that a few non-scientists (or is that nonsensists?) are so hysterical about the end of the world that, according to the Telegraph, the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, adding: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat."
The head of public relations, James Gillies, says he gets tearful phone calls, pleading for the £4.5 billion machine to stop.

BTW, given the significance of September 11th, couldn't the scientists at CERN have picked a different date? At least a week later? Or, is the 10th THE day for the experiment for some cosmological reasons?