Doomsdayers Sue Over Large Hadron Collider

I've posted about the LHC before; now the builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create a black hole or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet. Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe's CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there's no chance that the LHC would cause such cosmic catastrophes. The LHC, is due for startup later this year at CERN's headquarters on the French-Swiss border. It's expected to tackle some of the deepest questions in science; people outside the scientific mainstream are asking other questions: Could the collider create mini-black holes? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into "strangelets" that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?

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