Whether genuine lawsuit or fiendishly elaborate April Fool hoax , New Scientist reports that campaigners are taking legal action in the US to delay the start up of CERN's  Large Hadron Collider , a new particle smasher being built and tested near Geneva  claiming the facility which is designed to smash particles into each other with enough force to simulate conditions a billionth of a second after the Big Bang may prove appallingly successful at this task and create ' a stable black hole' or 'strangelet' powerful enough to  gobble up the earth and everything on it in a matter of minutes.

I think that outcome would be pretty cool but James Gillies a CERN spokesperson reportedly dismissed the 21 March lawsuit said to have been filed by Hawaii residents Luis Sancho and Walter Wagner against CERN and US contributors as ' utter nonsense' although to be fair, the safety record of the new collider has been blotched already following an explosion in a deep tunnel last year after some of the number crunchers set up the equipment wrong.

Sancho and Walter are alledgedly demanding that CERN and its US contributors  do not operate the new particle smasher  until they prove it is safe. The US contributors named are the Department of Energy (DoE), the National Science Foundation and Fermilab, an accelerator laboratory near Chicago.

The DoE and Fermilab will not comment on the case, insisting it is a legal matter to be dealt with by the Department of Justice.

Sancho and Walter's arguments are made here

Whatever the facts behind this case a rogue mini black hole would sure help put the current credit crunch into perspective and if it anihilated the world on a Monday morning as well it would be a real bonus.

Update.

apparently people both inside and outside the physics community have voiced concern that the LHC might trigger one of several theoretical disasters capable of destroying the Earth or even the entire Universe

It gets better:) 

Comments

jay   |2008-03-31 10:16:13 the first monday in may would be good....

Anonymous   |2008-03-31 14:29:02 I read an article like this and suddenly I'm filled with hope!

michael   |2008-03-31 16:22:15 ...feel like I've already been sucked into a black hole....

Jillian  - Quick and Painless   |2008-03-31 17:59:43 Could this be the answer we've been searching for? Sounds promising, that is, if things go wrong. ps: I love my new t-shirt-Thanks!

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