While I'm not for a moment decrying the genuine interest of my drinking companions, I'm sure most people's awareness of the LHC is related to scare-mongering stories that have been doing the rounds over recent weeks and months.

The LHC, it's claimed, will create miniature black holes that will swallow up the Earth. Or recreating the Big Bang will cause some mayhem that we can't even predict.

On the eve of "Big Bang Day" – September 10 – I had a distraught call from a neighbour. Her son had just returned from school, and he was terrified. His science teachers were, apparently, really worried about the LHC switch-on. I spoke to the student and reassured him. Cosmic rays smash through the Earth all the time, with far higher energies than we can hope to achieve artificially: if terrestrial mayhem were on the cards, it would have happened naturally long before now. But the situation was widespread: though he tried to be cool, my partner's son Ollie came back from college on Big Bang Day and was clearly relieved he – and the world – still existed.

It may seem strange for a science editor to say, but to me the scare stories actually have a positive value - a case of "no such thing as bad publicity". They have raised public awareness of particle physics to levels unprecedented probably since the 1930s, when antimatter was discovered.

And the fact that the world has survived may encourage some young students to ask what the fuss was all about; and to want to devote their lives to finding out what particle physics is really about. So this current episode of pseudoscience may – I hope – prompt new interest in what science is trying to understand when it confronts the frontiers of the Universe.