Most things I read in the Times doesn’t scare me.  And my beliefs give me a certain confidence that, no matter what gets printed in the Times, my quarterback is really quite superior to the other team’s quarterback.  Nevertheless, this article kind of freaked me out.  The long and short is, two scientists are trying to stop a bunch of other scientists from smashing protons together in their collider.  Because the proton smashing could create a tiny black hole.  That would grow.  And eat the earth.  And what makes it all so scary is that a judge is going to decide whether or not the experiment can go forward.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

In other words, yes, they could be dangerous.  I don’t like hearing this, mainly because I’m building a picket fence around my house, and I just planted a lot of expensive azaleas and two maple trees.  I don’t want my plants, or my family, to get sucked into a black hole.  But perhaps we’ll all get sucked into the hole, and then we’ll all come out the other side, all of us and all our shrubs, and none of us will even notice what happened.  That would be ideal, I think.