Prof. Dr. Michio Kaku about the LHC in Cern.

Relax. The earth is not going to be eaten up by a black hole any time soon. Doomsday-watchers around the world breathed a sign of relief last Wednesday when the Large Hadron Collider was finally turned on and ... well ... nothing happened. After weeks of breathless hype, a beam of protons was successfully sent traveling 17 miles around the circular ring of the Large Hadron Collider. Physicists popped champagne bottles and yelled for joy. The goal of the LHC is to open up a whole new area of physics by eventually creating temperatures and energies not seen since the universe began 13.7 billion years ago. Some of the deepest secrets of the universe may be revealed by the machine. Physicists, of course, had a different reaction from the Doomsday-watchers. They patiently pointed out that the LHC, although colossal by human standards, is a tiny firecracker compared to the titanic energies contained in rays that constantly bathe the earth every day for billions of years, yet the earth still stands. Furthermore, the sub-atomic particles produced by the LHC decay almost immediately and their energy cannot even light up a light bulb. The fact that you are still alive to read this sentence proves that the machine is harmless. But American physicists, in particular, had a very different reaction--one of sadness, even bitterness, that the LHC is being built in Switzerland, rather than in the US. In fact, the shortsightedness of the U.S. Congress has guaranteed that leadership in the field of advanced physics has left the U.S. and has passed to the Europeans.