As physicists get set to recreate the Big Bang (Watch live Webcast by CERN), German chemistry professor Otto Rossler predicts that their experiment will actually create a mini black hole that will suck all life and light into it and lead to the end of the world.

On Wednesday, somewhere below the French-Swiss border, scientists at CERN (a European organisation for nuclear research) are getting ready to drive two beams of particles into each other at close to the speed of light in a machine called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This will recreate the Big Bang and answer questions about the origins of life, the universe and everything. Though no one really knows what 'will' happen, all sorts of theories of sudden annihilation abound.

CERN's strongest opponent Otto Rossler, a German chemistry professor argues that just as with the Big Bang, this experiment too will create a mini-black-hole, an intense gravitational field that will keep sucking in matter until the entire world, and all its light, is gone.

On the lighter side — watch this CERN rap video. Presumably made by the young scientists of the organisation, the video explains everything related to the project in a fun, literally off-beat way. The hugely popular video reiterates a statement made by CERN Director General Robert Aymar: "The LHC will enable us to study in detail what nature is doing all around us. The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction."

If Thursday comes and in case you wake up Thursday morning and wonder why doomsday didn't arrive, the Mayans might have an answer for you. Hold on for 21-12-2012, which is when the Mayan Calendar comes to an end, because of a presumably catastrophic change.

One theory even ties in the Rossler black hole theory with the end of the Mayan calendar — according to it, the black hole will suck in everything on earth over four-and-a-half years, which is Dec 21, 2012.

More information found on TimesOnline
Large Hadron Collider will not turn world to goo, promise scientists

The Large Hadron Collider — the atom-smashing machine built underneath the Alps — has sent more internet-based harbingers of doom into a spin than it will have atomic particles whizzing around its 17-mile circumference when it is put into action next week. They fear that the energies released will be so powerful that a runaway black hole will be created that will engulf the planet or produce "quantum strangelets" transforming the Earth into a dead lump of "strange matter".

So worried are they about the impending end of the Universe that they have been to court to try to stop it.

Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho in Hawaii sought a temporary restraining order on scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, who they say have played down the chances that the collider could produce a tiny black hole, which could eat the Earth. They say that CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Their objections have been so vehement that the scientists behind the LHC have published a report to allay their fears and convince them that the world will carry on as normal after the biggest and most powerful atom collider ever built is turned on in Geneva.

"Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth -- and the planet still exists," the report says.

Just outside Geneva, 300ft below ground, the LHC will blast atomic particles around its circumference approximately 11,200 times every second, before smashing them headlong into one another.

Scientists have been using particle collision devices for 30 years without incident but concerns have arisen over the LHC because of its size and power.

The report was written by five CERN physicists, who were told to review a safety assessment written by colleagues in 2003 that also gave the project the green light.

The LHC is to start unleashing a beam of protons in the first stage of its commissioning process on Wednesday. Two parallel beams of particles, pulsing around the underground ring in opposite directions, will be bent by superconducting magnets at four points to cause them to collide. Detectors in the giant chamber will record the resulting sub-atomic debris.

This invisible rubble could help to resolve some of the biggest questions in physics such as the nature of mass, the weakness of gravity and whether, as some suggest, dimensions exist beyond our own. The new Safety Assessment Report, published by the Institute of Physics in London, says that any black holes produced by the collider would be "microscopic" and would decay almost immediately because they would lack the energy to grow or be sustained.

"Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists," it says.

As for the hypothesised "strange-lets", the report referred to data from the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, to say that these would not be produced by collisions in the LHC.

France has also asked its Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) to carry out a safety appraisal of the collider.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg rejected a last-ditch legal attempt last month to stop the LHC. The suit had been filed by a group of European citizens, led by a German biochemist, Otto Rössler, of the University of Tübingen.

He had deduced that it would be "quite plausible" to conclude that black holes resulting from the collider experiment "will grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside" across a devastating four-year period of decay.

The saner voice of science is shining through, however, as Valerie Jamieson, deputy features editor of New Scientist, explains on her blog.

"Scale the cosmic ray sums up to cover the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and the 100 billion galaxies in the visible Universe and you find that nature has already made the equivalent of 1,031 LHCs. Or if you like, 10 trillion LHCs are running every second. And we're still here."