BOFFIN: ATOM SMASHER ‘WILL DESTROY EARTH’ Chilling warning from Queen’s stargazer

ARE WE ALL DOOMED? Maybe, says Martin Rees THE whole world and everyone in it is about to be CRUSHED into a super-dense nugget the size of a football pitch – and it’s all the fault of boffins tampering with the fabric of space.

Professor Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, warned that eggheads firing up the Large Hadron Collider could accidentally create a BLACK HOLE which will crumple our planet like an old tin can.

The destruction would be complete in a nanosecond and the Earth would be turned into a ‘hyperdense sphere’ measuring just 330 feet across – the length of a single football field.

Consequently, all life would be exterminated in the blink of an eye.

Particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider shoot particles at incredibly high speeds, smash them together, and observe the fallout.

While they have led to massive breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe, they also carry a high risk, Rees says in his new book On The Future: Prospects for Humanity.

“Maybe a black hole could form, and everything shuddered.

“The second scary possibility is that the quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed objects called strangelets. That in itself would be harmless. then around suck it,” in he

“However, under some hypotheses a strangelet could, by contagion, convert anything else it encounters into a new form of matter, transforming the entire earth in a hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across.”

And Professor Rees goes further, predicting that the Collider – buried underground on the Swiss-French border – could collapse UNIVERSE!

He said: “Empty space – what physicists call the vacuum – is more than just nothingness. It is the arena for everything that happens.

“It has, latent in it, all the forces and particles that govern the physical world. The present vacuum could be fragile and unstable.

“Some have speculated that the concentrated energy created when particles crash together could trigger a ‘phase transition’ that would rip the fabric of space. This would be a cosmic calamity not just a terrestrial one.”

CERN, who operate the Collider, insist their doom machine is “absolutely safe”. the entire