{"id":11454,"date":"2008-09-13T14:10:17","date_gmt":"2008-09-13T21:10:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2008\/09\/13\/11454.html"},"modified":"2008-09-13T14:10:17","modified_gmt":"2008-09-13T21:10:17","slug":"lhc-and-the-end-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2008\/09\/13\/lhc-and-the-end-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"LHC and the end of the world"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I've seen a bunch of people in the past few days say things like \"Well, the Large Hadron Collider<\/a> has started up, and the world hasn't ended, so the fears about it were groundless.\"<\/p>\n

On the one hand, as far as I can tell, the scientific community's consensus is that the LHC poses no threat<\/a>. And I'm happy to believe that. In other words, I agree that the fears appear to be groundless.<\/p>\n

But the folks who've said that the threat has been disproven experimentally by the LHC being turned on<\/em> are a little premature. The first beam<\/em> was fired this past week, but the first collisions<\/em> won't be happening for another 6-8 weeks (according to Wikipedia's test timeline<\/a>), and it won't be operating at full power until sometime in 2009.<\/p>\n

So it may be a good idea to keep an eye on the Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?<\/a> web page. It will tell you at a glance, at any given moment, whether the LHC has in fact destroyed the world. If you don't want to have to keep checking that page, you can subscribe to the site's feed<\/a> so any change of status will show up in your feed-reader.<\/p>\n

I think we can rely on this service. The person who put it together is so confident in its accuracy that he offers a guarantee (viewable in the page's source code):<\/p>\n

\n

if the lhc actually destroys the earth & this page isn't yet updated please email [address redacted by Jed] to receive a full refund<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve seen a bunch of people in the past few days say things like “Well, the Large Hadron Collider has…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}