A Big Black Hole One Way or Another

If the world didn't already have enough to worry about, BBC News (online) has this headline:

Race for 'God particle' heats up

Europe's particle physics lab, Cern, is losing ground rapidly in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle", its US rival claims.

The particle, whose existence has been predicted by theoreticians, would help to explain why matter has mass.

Finding the Higgs is a major goal of Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

But the US Fermilab says the odds of its Tevatron accelerator detecting the famed particle first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best.

Both machines hope to see evidence of the Higgs by colliding sub-atomic matter at very high speeds. If it exists, the Higgs should emerge from the debris.

Unless a small black hole is formed instead, which is the fear a very small minority of critics, a smaller few with actual science credentials.

Still, the fact that scientists are calling this the "God particle" is just inviting trouble, don'tcha think?

The U.S. lab is located near Chicago, itself sort of a black hole where political ethics are sucked in and disappear. So why not just add the rest of the planet and be done with it.