My favourite part of that experiment was that they believed there to be a non-zero chance that it would trigger an uncontrollable reaction that would ignite the atmosphere and end the whole world but did it anyway.
Nah, the LHC dudes think there's an actual zero risk. The LHC doesn't produce collisions of any magnitude greater than collisions that occur in the upper atmosphere (from what I understand). That was the ultimate debunk of things like the whole "microscopic black hole will eat the earth" thing.
