The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva could soon begin smashing protons together in the study of matter.
But two men say the research might create a black hole that could devour the Earth - and maybe the universe.
They filed a lawsuit in the United States that seeks to block scientists from using the collider.

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

By DENNIS OVERBYE

None of the grim world news we hear and read every day will matter a bit if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole that will spell the end of the Earth - and maybe the universe.
Scientists say that is very unlikely - though they have been checking, just to make sure.
The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.
But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth.
Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years - namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.
The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.
Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom- Mr. Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up. CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the United States epartment of Energy, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.
James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe, Mr. Gillies said.
“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe, he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6.
But Mr. Wagner is not mollified. “They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe, he said in an interview, “but basically it’s propaganda. Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.
“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots, said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group.
Mr. Wagner filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York, from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider has been operating without incident since 2000.
Mr. Wagner, who lives in Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration.
Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said.
Nothing will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.
The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider and eventually swallow the Earth.
Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit. He pointed out that because of the chance nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.