Accelerator anxiety

IF YOU ARE reading this editorial over breakfast, and neither you nor your raisin bran has been sucked into a black hole, the worst fears about the Large Hadron Collider have not yet been realized.

Billed as the world's biggest physics experiment and the largest machine ever built, the collider at the nuclear research lab CERN outside Geneva smashes subatomic particles against each other at nearly the speed of light. From those experiments, which began Wednesday, particle physicists hope to unlock fundamental secrets about the nature of matter and the universe. But despite reassurances from major scientific organizations, a few researchers fear that the collider will create tiny black holes that will expand and suck in the entire world.

The more elusive the secret, the more exotic the risks involved in finding it out. If Benjamin Franklin ever flew a kite in a thunderstorm, as legend holds, he endangered only himself. It would be strange and sad if, in the course of establishing how and why matter emerged out of nothingness, an experiment were to consume a planetful of people who might be interested in the answer.

That possibility has surely been overblown. But this week's detour into the realm of science fiction - imagine, say, Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie racking their brains for a way to contain an ever-expanding black hole, and quickly - has drawn more public attention to the work of particle physicists who usually labor in anonymity.

Generating interest in this field can be a tough slog. The math is abstruse, and the fundamental concepts involved are a little too heavy for casual banter at the water cooler. But lucky for us that someone is willing to work on solving the deepest mysteries of the universe - so long as the experiment doesn't swallow the planet.