Black holes may erupt near Geneva this fall, but don't worry, there's a theory that says they'll evaporate almost immediately. Of course the theory hasn't been verified, and, anyway there is at most a one in 100 chance that they'll be formed, says Stephen Hawking.

Hawking's estimate of the probability that CERN's Large Hadron Collider will whip up sufficient energies to form miniscule black holes is given in the latest issue of Discover magazine.

He's the fellow who came up with the theory that miniature black holes are possible and that quantum mechanics implies that they'd evaporate rapidly. But suppose he's right about the lil devils but that they don't cooperate and leave immediately. Well, then, doomsday.

I have no idea of the likelihood of such an event. But we've come to a strange pass when a miniscule group of experts decides on what's a safe risk for the remaining 6 billion of us. True, in WWII, some physicists wondered whether the fission might just keep going and blow the world up. But, at least they could say there was a world war on.