"Are we all going to die next Wednesday?"

If you take a look at page 15 in the Daily Mail last Thursday (04.09.8) you would see the words “Are we all going to die next Wednesday?” written in big letters and a picture that looked like a black hole.
At first, I did not bother to read the article, but when my host sister saw this, she asked with an anxious voice: “Are we actually going to die?” I had to see what this was.

300ft under the Swiss-French border, near Geneva, CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) has built an 18 mile long train- sized tunnel. They are going to (hopefully) reveal the secrets of the atom, the forces and the particles that make up our universe.

The reason for the headline is that a few people think that there is a small chance that the experiment will cause the making of a mini-black hole, which will swallow the Earth. That is scenario one. The second scenario is that the experiment will cause a chain reaction in the fabric of space and time, and that it will rip apart the entire universe.

I think that by using that headline and that picture, the author of the article managed to get people interested. The problem is that kids, like my host sister, misinterpret it and that made them scared. I assume that the author’s intentions were to tell us how absurd the scenarios are, not to scare us.
In my opinion this is a great example for how the media has got the possibility to misguide and shape us.

However, I think I will keep my fingers crossed on Wednesday, just to be sure.