A massive atomic accelerator that copies the properties of the Big Bang could destroy all life on Earth by pulling it into a black hole, court case claims.
Walter Wagner, who operates a botanical garden on Hawaii's Big Island, and Luis Sancho of Spain have asked for a ban to stop the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) preliminary up its Large Hadron Collider.
The particle accelerator, which will be the world's most powerful particle smasher, is due to begin hurling protons at each other at its base outside
Physicists hope the device, which has taken 14 years and $8.7 billion to build, will supply clues to the universe's origins by imitating its condition one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Although CERN scientists have already ruled out the likelihood in a safety review, Mr Wagner and Mr Sancho say there is at least a small possibility of annihilation of the planet and possibly the universe.
They claim CERN has under-played the odds the collider could create 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
A presenter for the research centre said the claims were "nonsense". "Much higher energy collisions than those at the [collider] arise in nature, because cosmic ray particles zip about our galaxy at close to the speed of light," he said.
"The moon has undergone such accident for 5 billion years without being devoured by a starving black hole."
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