A few years ago an alarming story about a physics experiment ran prominently in another newspaper. A new atom-smasher, it claimed, was threatening to destroy the Earth.

After terrifying readers with tales of black holes and “strange matter” that could end our existence in the blink of an eye, the piece gave the game away in the final paragraph. Scientists, it turned out, rated the chances of this happening as “infinitesimally small”.

There are few stories you couldn't run with that disclaimer. Elvis might be alive. John McCain might be planning to replace Sarah Palin with Britney Spears. Scientists will always tell you that few things are truly impossible, apart from proving a negative. But many are so improbable that they can safely be discounted, so much so that we tend to laugh at those who don't.

The world duly survived that not-so-close brush with oblivion. “Particle accelerator spells doom”, however, is proving to be a powerful meme, for it is back and making news as never before.

Times Archive, 1984: Higg's boson sparks off excitement

An international team of 78 physicists were involved in the discovery of this elusive object

BACKGROUND

• Mysteries of the Universe to be solved

• Journey to the beginning of time is nearly complete

Multimedia

• Comment Central: Listen to the LHC rap

On Wednesday the CERN laboratory will start up its new Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will reveal profound insights into the nature of the Universe. Yet much of the press seems more interested in the speculations of a few cranks.

Once again the cry has gone up that the accelerator could create a black hole that would devour the planet. Legal challenges have sought to halt it, and these have been more widely reported this week than the project itself.

Yet the claim is utterly ridiculous. It is true that the LHC might generate black holes, but these would be minuscule and would decay immediately. As the physicist Michio Kaku has said, the LHC has as much chance of ending the world as it does of producing fire-breathing dragons.

This isn't a story that's worthy of serious discussion, even as kooky fun. It might sound harmless, but it feeds stereotypes of crazy and reckless boffins who know everything about nothing and nothing about everything, and encourages the contemptible but widespread view that scientists are not to be trusted. It is of a piece with other media-led panics in which expert opinion has been ignored, from the MMR vaccine to GM crops. In short, it's demeaning to science, and insulting to scientists.

The LHC is one of the most exciting experiments of this or any age, yet the thing most people now know and remember about it is a frivolous half-truth. That is a pretty depressing indication of the value we place on science.

Mark Henderson is science editor of The Times

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