Doomsday Debacles: Halley's Comet and The Large Hadron Collider (Numbers 6 and 5)

 

Halley's comet, a ball of icy dust discovered by the British Astronomer Edmond Halley, is visible from earth every 76-ish years. Astronomers at the Chicago's Yerkes Observatory claimed that when Earth passed through Halley's comet tail on May 1910 it would emit cyanogen gas, a poisonous miasma, onto Earth. They stated that this cyanogen gas would cause widespread death on Earth. The people who believed this claim stuffed towel under their doors and placed paper over the keyholes in their doors. Believers even bought “comet pills”, specialized masks, and bottled oxygen to escape the toxic waste that was supposedly going to be emitted from Halley's comet. People who were correct and believed that the Halley's comet doomsday prophecy was a bunch of bologna held rooftop “comet parties” to observe the harmless beauty.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is a 17 mile circular particle accelerator located under Geneva, Switzerland. This particle accelerator collides Hydrogen protons, or positively charged particles in the nucleus, at near the speed of light in order to recreate the physical properties of the universe at the time of the Big Bang.  The Big Bang is a theory that attempts to explain how the universe developed from a very tiny, dense state into what it is today. The LHC aids in the discovery of subatomic elements or particles. However, many people believe that black holes, or regions of space having such massive gravitational fields that no matter or radiation can escape, will be a byproducts of the LHC. They believe that these black holes will engulf the world, thereby destroying everything on it. In some sense, these people are correct. The LHC does create black holes, however, they are infinitesimally small. These black holes are microscopic, being only a couple cells across. Also, these black holes are only present for seconds, even milliseconds. So, these black holes don't exist long enough to encompass the Earth.