The Five Scientific Experiments Most Likely to End the World
S Peter Davis on Cracked.com: Let’s face it, we really trust science. Studies suggest that the vast majority of people will murder another human being, if a guy in a lab coat tells them it’s OK. But surely in their insatiable curiosity and desire to put knowledge above all things, science would never, say, inadvertently set off a chain of events that lead to some sort of disaster that ended the world. Right?
Recreating the Big Bang: Scientists are kind of pissed that they weren’t around when the Big Bang happened. Here we had an event that holds all of the secrets to reality, and we missed it because we were lazy enough not to evolve for another 13 billion years. The solution, science says, is to make it happen again. They assure us that they can stage a new Big Bang if they smash some protons together really, really fucking hard.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Well, first imagine an apocalyptic nuclear holocaust. Multiply that by about one hundred and twenty thousand billion, and then multiply that by around the neighborhood of infinity. That equals around one eighth of the magnitude of the Big Bang. Nevertheless, scientists are pretty sure they can contain their Big Bang in an erlenmeyer flask, just so long as they remember to cork it.
