What helped contribute to her death was the despicable way the LHC was covered in the Indian media. If you look at the news piece, many people were frightened by what they had seen on the television.
The media were into sensationalising a physics experiment and giving air time to people who did not know what they were talking about.
Of the two people bringing the law suit in Hawaii, not one of them was a physicist. One was a chemist!!!
We also had this puerile nonsense when they built the Large Iron Collider in the US, and that has been running since 2000 with no ill effects.
Everyday, we are bombarded by particles at higher energies than will be produced by the LHC.
Did they tell her that? I think not, just salacious stories of the end of the world.
This girl was a vulnerable teenager, who in spite of her family trying to steer her away from this garbage being churned out by the media, ended up taking her life. As I said before, she was not the only child frightened by this irresponsible news reporting. I have read on the
Bad Astronomy and Universe Today website accounts of eight year old children in utter tears and petrified that they were going to die, so to say there was something wrong with the girl is utterly insensitive.
My first degree was BSc Physical Sciences, and I did my major in physics, and one of my interests was particle physics, and I find it deeply upsetting that this branch of Physics has been so misrepresented by the media to the point that a vulnerable child was frightened into drinking poison.
I would appreciate it if the title of this thread could be changed to "LHC fault found" , or "Large Hadron Collider fault found".
It is not a doomsday machine, it never was, and to call it that is a gross insult to many of those who worked on this project and on all of us in this branch of science.
