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First off you seem to know WAY more about this than me.

But where is the whole "black hole" thing coming from? Isn't this a fairly conventional supercollider experiment where a bunch of junk going one way is smashed into a bunch of junk going the other way and then the bean counters watch the broken bits fly around? How would that have anything to do with creating a black hole? Aren't they (theoretically) made by huge amounts of mass being compressed into a single small point?

You can make a black hole out of any amount of matter as long as you compress it small enough, they are trying to detect miniature black holes that they make themselves, the time that they expect it to exist is to short to not even know if it existed which is why they will record the type of radiation that comes from the black hole. That isn't all they are doing with it though, I believe it is a normal particle accelerator except much more powerful. Cern did want to go a lot bigger though, and probably will in the future that is when we truly need to worry. Although this experiment could be bad enough, if a black hole was created for that very very small period of time, it could munch up some subatomic particles that where in an atom. Because protons, neutrons, and electrons are made up of smaller orbiting particles they don't have an actual size and you can compress them. This experiment has NEVER been done before obviously, and no one can truly say what would happen if a small black hole was created while touching or even inside of another particle. The gravity of the black hole would remain the same of the particles that created it, so it wouldn't draw anything to it but while being inside of a particle accelerator at least in my mind is BAD. I think the best way to explain it is to take the information from the article itself where it says they are trying to recreate an event that took place right after the big bang. I'm not sure how to say this but an even that caused all of the matter and energy in the universe to be created i personally don't want being repeated on my planet.