1 In 4 Kiwis Following Collider Story Concerned

23 September 2008

One In Four Kiwis Following Collider Story Concerned End Of World May Be Nigh

News that the Big Bang Hadron Collider experiment has been delayed two months may bring a sigh of relief to the thousands of New Zealanders concerned the end of the world may be nigh.

UMR Research asked New Zealanders in a nationwide poll how closely they had followed news stories about the Big Bang experiment in Switzerland using the underground large Hadron Collider.

Just over half (53%) had followed the story moderately to very closely. These people were then asked to rate how concerned they were that the Collider would create a mini black-hole leading to the end of the world and of these one in four (27%) said they were moderately to very concerned and 72% said they were not concerned.

“Although it’s only a minority of those who have followed the story that can’t see any light at the end of this tunnel, it indicates some thousands of Kiwis are worried. I guess if they end up being right, we’ll never know anyway,” a Director of UMR Tim Grafton said.

“Relative to other stories in the news though this was more of a whimper than a Big Bang. For instance, 86% of New Zealanders followed the shooting of two police officers in Mangere moderately to very closely and 80% followed the Owen Glenn and Winston Peters testimonies to the privileges committee of Parliament,” he said The Hadron Collider is a 27 kilometer long circuit of super-cooled magnets and the experiment is designed to re-create the moments at the start of the universe by forcing the collision of opposing beams of protons.

The telephone poll of 750 New Zealanders aged 18 years and over was conducted from 11-14 September 2008. It has a margin of error of + 3.6%.

More information: Hadron_Collider_Media_Release__Sept_08.pdf

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