Question: Do you think anything like a temporary blackout like in the book 'Flashforward' could ever occur from experiments at CERN?

Suzie Sheehy answered on 13 Mar 2011:

I haven’t read that book so had to look up the plot! Sounds complex, but what I get from it was that in the novel they decided that the ‘flashforward’ wasn’t caused by the LHC at all, but by some neutrino burst??

Anyway, to try to answer… there has been a lot of hype about the experiments at CERN “causing the end of the world” or “destroying the earth”…

The main argument against this is that the particles we collide at CERN are of a MUCH lower energy than those that bombard our planet from outer space all the time (cosmic rays). If there were any chance that something catastrophic was going to happen, it would have happened already from the cosmic rays.

The other thing to point out is that this kind of ‘scare’ happens with the start-up of most new high-energy particle colliders – it happened with the Tevatron in the USA and (I’m sure) with others as well. The problem is that we only build these machines every 20 or more years, so most people forget that the same thing happened last time.
I can’t resist linking to this website:
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

On a serious note, the public concern is taken very seriously and many detailed calculations were carried out to ensure that there was not going to be any safety issues with the machine.

I was amused, though, that the day which received the most “hype” was when the LHC switched on…. I thought that was quite strange because they weren’t even colliding particles on that day, only accelerating one beam at a time to test the machine. When the first real collisions happened there wasn’t anywhere near as much of a fuss…

I hope that helps answer your question, ask another if not!