Gail collins: digging ourselves a black hole

Exciting times approach up, people. Democratic convention! Republican convention! And then, on Sept. 10, the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider!

The Large Hadron, you may remember, is the 17-mile-long particle accelerator pedal being built near Geneve.

Once it's up and run, its designers believe it will take atom physics research to a whole new level. Its critics think it may create a black hole that will sup up the existence. This is what is known as a wide range of possibilities.

I am delivery this up now because it is ever important to remember that things could be worse. You may be worried about a new Cold War or a major bank failure, or afraid of losing your job or your house or your recognition rating. You may be depressed by your first look at the fall TV agenda.

Whatever your concerns, it is important, in these dark minute, to remember that other people have been having a worse summertime than you. To name just a few: John Prince Edward, the mayor of Motor City and all the people involved in the devising of "The Love Guru."

position is all. If you're going to fret, I say, fret about that black hole. For one thing, it makes it much easier to agenda unpleasant tasks for the sec half of Sep. Heads, the planet survives. Tails, the root canal never happens.

The vast bulk of the scientific community believes that the Large Hadron will not lead to the devastation of all life as we know it. Or at least as Greg Landsberg, a physicist from Brown University, was quoted as expression, the chances are "wholly small letter."

"Totally small letter" are excellent odds when it comes to, say, risking a twister on your wedding ceremony day. I think I speak for us all when I say that I would like something more conservative when it comes to planet-eating black holes.

So I called Landsberg, who explained that in physics, there is no such thing as zero chance. "For instance, if all the molecules of air in the room where you're sitting would suddenly cross to one side, you would not have any air to breathe. This probability is not zero. It is in the 10 to the minus-25 range."

Black hole eats everything. All the air molecules decide to march off to the other side of the room and hold a caucus. I have totally gotten over worrying about reforming America's Electoral College.

Landsberg thinks people should concentrate on more likely dangers, such as nuclear war or global warming. "The universe is a pretty safe place to live unless we mess it up," he noted.

This sounded very wise. However, fretting about black holes is more fun than worrying about global warming; it feels very cutting edge and does not require recycling.

Almost everybody agrees that the Large Hadron Collider may be capable of producing little tiny, black holes. In a way, that's the idea. Landsberg says he doesn't think the probability of creating black holes is more than about 1 percent, but you could easily have gotten 100-1 odds a year or so ago on John McCain and Barack Obama being the presidential nominees.

The idea that humankind has gone to extraordinary effort and expense to construct a black-hole-making machine shouldn't be all that startling. This is the same humankind that went out of its way to invent nuclear warheads, SUVs and deep-fried Twinkies-on-a-stick. There is nothing we enjoy more than sealing our own doom in the most creative ways possible.

Unlike radiation and trans-fat, the black holes have a winning tendency to evaporate the second they're produced. And if one did last longer, Landsberg figures the odds are very, very remote that it would hang around Switzerland. "It would just disappear somewhere into space," he said.

This is what we like best of all, really. Creating a problem and then sending it off to live in somebody else's universe.

In truth, we've been down this road before. There's an ion collider on Long Island named Rhic that critics thought might create something called strangelets, which have similar earth-gobbling talents to black holes.

One report estimated that the possibility of strangelets popping up was only 1 in 50 million - odds that Dennis Overbye noted in The New York Times were actually more favorable than some government-sponsored lotteries.

Still, we've had the collider in the New York metropolitan area for some time now with no ill effects and have turned our attention to more important projects, such as never finishing construction of the 9/11 memorial.

If there are any strangelets, they have adapted and merged into the general population. Some of them are no doubt running for political office at this very moment.