google it up — this way, you have more than one source to use, and people can’t track you back to a single article. ;p
sure, but they were completely different in many ways: the energy involved, the velocity involved, the particles to be clashed, the cooling system.
here’s the big controversy that got people postal about black holes: the notion that baby black holes are stable and tend to dissolve, that very notion is so closely related to what was being tested that you can pretty much say today’s collision is when they finally checked whether or not it was true.
fear of black holes and strangelets and what-have-you, yes. well, there’s always a chance, but then again people make nuclear power plants without as much as a second thought, why would they care about the much-smaller chances of uh-oh doomsday situations particle colliding yields?
what i was concerned about was not what could be produced within the experiment, but of possible engineering flaws. see, for a stable black hole to show up and eat the Earth, every thing must happen just the right way. for a massive human-error-caused disaster, on the other hand, something has to go wrong. and the prospect of something going generally wrong tends to scare me way more than the prospect of everything happening just the right way.
well, it’s a risk every time. next time can always be the time where the damned black hole stabilises & eats us all.
four to seven minutes of being sucked by an ever-increasing force of gravity, subject to internal bleeding and excruciating migraines, not to mention the ground trembling and tearing itself open, and houses generally falling on you? (wait, that actually does sound kind of cool).
at any rate, i’m still rather embarrassed about humankind & the whole situation, from a what-will-the-aliens-think perspective.