Hadron Collider
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A giant particle accelerator that mimicks the effects of the "Big Bang" could destroy all life on Earth by sucking it into a black hole, a lawsuit claims.
Walter Wagner, who runs a botanical garden on Hawaii's Big Island, and Luis Sancho, a Spaniard, have asked for an injunction to prevent the European Centre for Nuclear Research, or Cern, starting up the Large Hadron Collider.
A scientist works at the Cern's Large Hadron Collider
Physicists hope that the £4 billion device will provide clues to the universe's originsThe accelerator, which will be the world's most powerful particle smasher, is due to begin hurling protons at each other at its base outside Geneva this summer.
Physicists hope that the device, which has taken 14 years and £4 billion to build, will provide clues to the universe's origins by mimicking its condition a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Although Cern scientists have already ruled out the possibility in a safety review, Mr Wagner and Mr Sancho say there is at least a small chance of total annihilation of the planet and maybe the universe.
They claim Cern has under-played the chances that the collider could produce a tiny black hole or a particle called a "killer strangelet" that would turn the Earth into a shrunken lump of "strange matter".
Their lawsuit, filed in the Federal District Court in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order banning Cern from finishing the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment.
Defendants named in the suit are Cern, the US Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the National Science Foundation. The US Justice Department said it would represent the Energy Department at a meeting over the lawsuit in Hawaii in June.
Cern is not bound by an American court's jurisdiction, but Mr Wagner said a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helped to supply the accelerator's crucial super-conduction magnets, would be enough to stop the programme.
A spokesman for Cern said the lawsuit's claims were "complete nonsense". "Much higher energy collisions than those at the LHC occur in nature, because cosmic ray particles zip around our galaxy at close to the speed of light," he said.
"The moon has undergone such collisions for five billion years without being devoured by a ravenous black hole or killer strangelet."