It is expected that Micro Black Holes will be created at the staggering rate of one per second.(Risk Evaluation for MBHs.) To reassure the public, CERN has stated that these MBHs will instantly evaporate in the LHC based on the "Hawking Radiation" theory and they would already have been created by naturally occurring high-energy cosmic rays. HOWEVER, "Hawking Radiation" is only a theory, is disputed by other physicists and Stephen Hawking, though famous, has never been right about anything.
As for naturally occurring high-energy cosmic rays creating MBHs, this is theoretical also and has never been observed or proven. "What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc." From 'New York Times'
On May 5, 2008 an inquisitive teacher's letter to CERN experiment team ATLAS concerning MBH creation was met with this condescending response: "Now talk about fussing about nothing: first of all, a hole, black to boot, and microscopic on top of that! If tiny, weeny little holes are going to get a big grown-up man like you all scared, holy banana, what would a big white bump do to you?" and this unretouched photo at left.(Note phrase; 'Microscopic Black Hole Factory'.)
Additionally Aurélien Barrau and Julien Grain speaking on behalf of CERN say "...these black holes are not dangerous and do not threaten to swallow up our already much-abused planet." the obvious implication being the Earth is damaged goods and therefore experiments that cause a black hole would just put it out of it's misery anyway? Black Hole Info.
"Worries about the end of the planet have shadowed nearly every high-energy experiment. Such concerns were given a boost by Scientific American—presumably inadvertently—in 1999. That summer, the magazine ran a letter to the editor about Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider(RHIC), then nearing completion. The letter suggested that the Brookhaven collider might produce a “mini black hole” that would be drawn toward the center of the earth, thus “devouring the entire planet within minutes.” Frank Wilczek, a physicist who would later win a Nobel Prize, wrote a response for the magazine. Wilczek dismissed the idea of mini black holes devouring the earth, but went on to raise a new possibility: the collider could produce strangelets, a form of matter that some think might exist at the center of neutron stars. In that case, he observed, “one might be concerned about an ‘ice-9’-type transition,” wherein all surrounding matter could be converted into strangelets and the world as we know it would vanish." From 'The New Yorker'
"It is believed that the higher energy of the lead-lead collisions of the Large Hadron Collider(LHC), compared to the RHIC, will produce more strange quarks in the quark-gluon plasma(QGP) than are produced at RHIC's QGP. This higher production of strange quarks might allow for production of a strangelet at the LHC(Risk Evaluation for Strangelets), and searches are planned for such upon commencement of collisions at the LHC ALICE detector." From 'Wikipedia' Strange Matter Info.
* End of July: The LHC is expected to be cooled down. The experiments are requested to have their beam pipes baked out. * Early August: The experimental caverns will be closed after the caverns and tunnel have been patrolled. Safety tests will then be performed. From then on the controlled access system will be fully activated. At this stage an Injection Test into sector 23 is planned. * Early September: First particles will be injected, and the commissioning with beams will start. *It is expected that it will take about 2 months to have first collisions at 10 TeV centre of mass energy.(Most powerful collisions ever done.) * Energy of the 2008 run: Agreed to be 10 TeV. The machine considers this to be a safe setting to optimize up-time of the machine until the winter shut-down (starting likely around end of November). Therefore, simulations can now start for 10 TeV. * The winter shut-down will then be used to commissioning and train the magnets up to full current, such that the 2009 run will start at the full 14 TeV design energy. From CERN Website.
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