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Two men have sought an injunction in a US court to prevent the European Large Hadron Collider (LHC) from operating, alleging its new atom-smashing experiments could endanger the Earth.
An injunction has been asked in a US court to prevent the operation of the Large Hadron Collider on the French/Swiss border. Photo: LHC. Credit: Image Editor/Flickr
Walter Wagner, a botanist and Luis Sancho of Spain filed the lawsuit in a Hawaii court on March 21 asking for work on the collider's particle acceleration to be halted while safety reviews take place.
Essentially the pair cite scientific concerns that LHC physicists, in smashing sub-atomic particles at energy levels never seen before, may create the environment for tiny black holes to occur, possibly swallowing up the Earth. They also say it is possible for a particle called a "strangelet" to be produced out of the experiment which would have the ability to convert our Earth to "strange matter."
However James Gillies, head of communications at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), told the New York Times the LHC had been declared "safe".
“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said. “Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he noted adding that the LHC safety record had been tested and passed in two safety reports with a third on the way.
Mr Wagner though, has described the safety reviews as "fundamentally flawed."
Most physicists have said the chances of black holes appearing during the experiments were "minute" and if they did occur, should evaporate and disappear straight away.
The LHC, which has been operated by CERN since 1994, aims to create as near as possible conditions which existed in the Universe a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang when particles collided at great speed, thus giving physicists an insight into the Universe's origins.
"Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature," reports the New York Times.
The 27-kilometre accelerator built to conduct this experiment on the France-Switzerland border will commence its latest experiments in particle smashing in May.
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