I was moving a tv at 08.30 this morning with Jon as my alarm sounded to signal the end of the world. We looked at each other for a moment expecting the world to be sucked into a Black Hole a brief pause our lives about to flash before our eyes… NOTHING!! on with the job in hand.

Now that the European Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is completed and up and running, it would appear that the slew of articles that had popped up quoting doomsayers, might of been a bit over the top. In a recently written artical that stated the 17-mile, $5.8 billion supercollider – which will slam protons together in an attempt to learn more about the building blocks of the universe – will inadvertently create a black hole that will gobble up the Earth.

Prof Llewellyn Smith, however, has assured Radio 4’s Today programme that the LHC – designed to help solve fundamental questions about the structure of matter and, hopefully, arrive at a “theory of everything” – is completely safe and will not be doing anything that has not happened “100,000 times over” in nature since the earth has existed. “The chances of us producing a black hole are minuscule,” he said, “and even if we do, it can’t swallow up the earth.” So, folks, who do you believe?