Will LHC Kill us All?

You have probably heard rumblings about the sci-fi dangers of the Large Hadron Collider, but didn’t know what they were about. Well, let me break it down for you:

A strangelet is a hypothetical particle that has an up quark, a down quark, and a strange quark — or at least equal numbers of them in that ratio. The worry is that the LHC will create a strangelet in one of its experiments. If a strangelet comes in contact with a lump of ordinary matter such as Earth, it could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter.

This doomsday scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter.