Court Asked To Stop Building Of Atom Smasher, Plaintiffs Fear It Will Create Black Hole That Will Suck Earth

Redmond, WA (AHN) - Two residents of Hawaii have asked a district court in Honolulu to stop the Department of Energy and its partners from constructing a particle accelerator facility on the border between France and Switzerland.

Walter F. Wagner and Luis Sancho's federal lawsuit filed Monday also seeks to delay the opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) pending its safety inspection on grounds that the gigantic atom smasher that physicists will use to study the origin of the universe could accidentally create "strangelet," an unknown matter, or an expanding black hole that both could destroy the Earth.

According to MSNBC, representatives of Fermilab in Illinois and the Center for Nuclear Energy Research (CERN) in Geneva said the LHC will not cause a cosmic catastrophe. Fermilab and CERN, together with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation in Virginia are defendants in the case.

The LHC is scheduled for opening in May. It can produce incredible energies to recreate short-lived particles that will give physicists clues on what existed when the universe was formed, the nature of dark matter and extent of space.