Well they quickly realized that this was crazy, and that they were never going to be able to actually make a weapon out of one of these machines. Mos… - Suzie Sheehy

[I]f you take Einstein's equation E=mc², E is energy, m is the mass and c is 299,792,458 meters per second, so that squared, I'd have to get to tell me what that is, but that's a very big number. So it takes an enormous amount of energy to create even a tiny tiny amount of matter. So that's why, over the years, our machines have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, and reached up to higher and higher energies in order to create particles of higher and higher masses. Now that might seem slightly counterintuitive, but if we look down at the low energy scale, we get our... everyday objects, and in fact up here at sort of 10 MeV, which is like a sort of everyday energy scale, are the up and s where our s and s are created from. And if we go up in energy scale, we slowly... over time discovered all these other types of s and s, and all these other things that seem to play no role in our everyday lives.

So it sounded like a crazy question, but if you had a brain tumor you might very well want to stick your head in the beam of a particle accelerator.

So the final thing that you probably shouldn't do with a particle accelerator is: You probably shouldn't destroy the Earth with it. ...People seem to think that when we design new massive particle accelerators that are going to have particles that are huge energies that we've never created before in the lab, that somehow... we just built it for the lulls, and then we're going to destroy the earth with it, and that we haven't quite thought it through, and that we're not quite sure what we're doing... If you're at all concerned, please go to HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheWorldYet.com and... you can tell me what you find there.