Europe’s LHC Invokes Lawsuit from Americans
The lawsuit’s claims are “complete nonsense”, James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN, told New Scientist. “The LHC will start up this year, and it will produce all sorts of exciting new physics and knowledge about the universe,” he said, adding: “A year from now, the world will still be here.”
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Right around the corner is the completion of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC at CERN—a European center for particle physics near Geneva, Switzerland, building the world’s largest particle smasher. Originally planned on beginning operation in May of 2008, the scheduled plan of operations will be in mid-July of 2008. But attempting to prevent the scientific process are two individuals, Luis Sancho and Walter Wagner of Hawaii, who filed a lawsuit on March 21, 2008, at Hawaii’s US District Court against the CERN organization, and the United States contributors of the project—the Department of Energy (DoE), the National Science Foundation, and Fermilab [an accelerator laboratory near Chicago].
The lawsuit is to prevent the operation of the LHC until it is proven safe, raising theoretical scenarios which charge the LHC as creating particles that can “gobble up Earth, such as killer strangelets”. The strangelets are hypothetical blobs of matter which are known to have strange quarks, according to NewScientist.com’s news service writer Hazel Muir, in the article “Particle smasher ‘not a threat to the Earth’ “. With physicists describing the fundamental particles which make up the Universe, and how everything interacts within it in high detail, there seemed to be something missing within the story known to humanity. The LHC is hopefully able to fill in the missing knowledge with its experimental data of CERN’s LHC.
CERN is hoping to answer many specific questions for the world to find out, such as what is the origin of mass? Why do tiny particles weight the amount they do? And why do some particles have no mass? What is being mainly focused on for an explanation is the 1964 unobserved hypothesis, Higgs boson, considered as a key undiscovered particle considered essential for the Standard Model to work. Additionally, the ATLAS and CMS experiments will also be searching for the particle signs, but the missing Higgs boson will be the major breakthrough in the particle physics, more than the 1970s when it was realized that there were very close ties between two of the four fundamental forces—the weak force and the electromagnetic force. With this in mind, a lot of CERNS’s newly found research will be based on previous breakthroughs and theories by experts in the field, not to be considered as a danger to the world requiring a lawsuit.
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