There have been a lot of reports lately about the apocalyptic September 10, when an international team of physicists will attempt to circulate a beam through the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), as part of an experiment meant to explore the missing pieces in the Universe puzzle.

But how accurate are these predictions that portray the LHC experiment as the releaser of black holes that will destroy Earth and humankind? As scary as it may sound, these predictions are far from being true, and this can easily be explained through simple physics.

The probability that black holes will appear is something to take into consideration, however, even if black holes indeed form, they would be very small ones and evaporate into a shower of particles. The black holes pessimists are expecting to see are universal-scaled ones, and that is impossible to recreate with the given energy in the LHC.

“The LHC will enable us to study in detail what nature is doing all around us,” said CERN Director General Robert Aymar last week, amid fears that the LHC experiment will go bad. “The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction.”

According to a study published in Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, “if particles at the LHC had the power to destroy Earth, we would have never been given the chance to exist, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth or other astronomic bodies.”

The cosmic rays are extremely energetic particles coming from outer space, with orders of magnitude above the LHC. The cosmic rays collisions produced in the LHC will not be nearly as energetic as those in outer space, and therefore will be incapable of producing vacuum bubbles or dangerous magnetic monopoles, posing no real threat to Earth and humankind.

The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. The LHC machine has undergone extensive preparations for the big day, when scientists will attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time.

The LHC accelerator is capable of producing beams seven times more energetic than any other similar machine, and the beams are expected to reach their maximum intensity (30 times greater) by 2010, when the machine will reach maximum design performance.

On September 10, the collider will be operating at a temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-271 °C), where helium particles become superfluid, as LHC project leader Lyn Evans explained. The machine should be able to produce the first circulating beam at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV).

The plan for the LHC is to achieve the acceleration and collision of two beams at an energy of 5 TeV per beam by the end of the year. According to CERN, this experiment will take particle physics research to a new frontier.

Despite all attempts to stop the Large Hadron Collider from operating, including death threats directed toward scientists participating in the program, the experiment will carry on as planned. And there’s nothing to worry about, as LHC’s Safety Assessment Group pointed out: “nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programs on Earth – and the planet still exists.”