It's funny you mentioned this fear of a black hole created at CERN, I know some people who still thinks so:)
Yet CERN crews is feeling more dissapointed after that diphoton peak has disappeared after the last more powerful launch. Heh, back to theory again!
But gravitational lensing makes us smile back
I love the smiling lens pic from Hubble! One of my favorite photos. In fact, it was the closing image for this post in the first draft. However, I thought the video would have a greater impact.
When media takes what they want to take from physics, we end up with crazy story like physicists who want to destroy Earth by creating a black hole at CERN... :)
@liberosist: thanks for the great post btw!
The bigger fear is the creation of strangelets There is a theory that strangelets, matter composed of an equal number of up, down, and strange quarks, is actually more stable the normal matter. As the strangelet interacts with normal matter, it converts the normal matter to strangelets. this would cause a chain reaction, and the entire Earth could be converted to strangelets in a short amount of time.
If so, that strangelets would appears in a RHIC (which is older than LHC), because the amount of collision is higher in there.
But it doesn't happen.