The Large Hadron Collider goes online next Wednesday. Apparently there were — and maybe still are — fears that switching on the LHC will basically cause the universe to cease to exist. Will it create strange matter that turns all matter it touches into strange matter, sort of like Ice-9 does for water? Will it create a black hole that will devour the earth and all living things on it? Will it create some sort of awfully horrible weird particle that will interact messily with matter, causing the universe to explode on a subatomic level? The tension is so thick and the fears so high that lawsuits were file — lawsuits! — to stop the LHC from going online. Fortunately, reason prevailed. Of course, if the LHC does indeed end up transforming the entire universe into strange matter, then I guess the anti-LHC crowd will have the last laugh in the few picoseconds they have left to ponder it.

Scientists who work with the LHC suggest that there’s a better chance of evaporating spontaneously into subatomic particles while shaving than the earth collapsing from any LHC experiments. Mostly, they point out, the Earth has been getting slammed for millions of years with the kinds of particles that the LHC will be generating, and nothing bad has happened yet. There is, of course, always a first time for this sort of thing.

And I may just end up not shaving anymore.