MOSCOW, July 8 (RIA Novosti) - Proton collisions...
Research, known by its French initials CERN, involves more than 2,000 physicists from hundreds of universities and laboratories in 34 countries.The accelerator complex, 27 kilometers in circumference, sits in a subterranean tunnel one hundred meters below the Franco-Swiss border, near Geneva, Switzerland.
Once it is up to speed, it is hoped the collider will produce the so-called Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.
Some theorists and members of the general public have long voiced fears that microscopic black holes may appear as a result of the experiment and capture the surrounding matter, ultimately leading to the destruction of the entire planet.
However, scientists have consistently dismissed these allegations as "ridiculous" - even if a microscopic black hole did form, they say,
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