COULD an artificial black hole gobble up the Earth? Two people claim the threat is real, and are trying to delay the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the powerful particle smasher due to be switched on in July.
On 21 March, Walter Wagner from Hawaii and Luis Sancho from Spain filed a lawsuit in Hawaii against the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, which hosts the LHC, and its collaborators in the US. Wagner and Sancho claim the collider could create planet-devouring 鈥渒iller strangelet鈥� particles or mini black holes.
Such concerns are 鈥渃omplete nonsense鈥�, says CERN spokesman James Gillies. . It pointed out that any black hole the LHC might cook up would evaporate almost instantly, and that its gravity would be too puny to gobble up anything, let alone a planet. Coincidentally, CERN plans to release an updated safety assessment in the next few weeks.
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It is not the first time Wagner has suggested a particle collider could end the world. His last target was the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, which was switched on in 2000.
