Woman Tries to Stop Particle Collider From Destroying Earth
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Thursday, Mar 11, 2010
A woman in Germany has petitioned the country’s highest court to halt the recently-restarted Large Hadron Collider. Her concern (widely, and somewhat bizarrely, echoed by others) is that the particle collider would bring about not the discovery of the Higgs boson but a black hole that would swallow the planet from Switzerland outwards.
The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe apparently didn’t care much about her attempt at planetary salvation, declaring that the plaintiff was “unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about.”
Like Venkman in Ghostbusters, when he pleas with city officials to not shutdown the Echo Containment Unit at the end of Ghostbusters, concerns about the LHC are about to reach a fever pitch. By the first week of April, the collider will be wound up to unprecedented levels of power – 7.0 TeV (teraelectronvolts), in its search for what some call the “God particle.” Those are also probably the same people who are worried that the experiment – this whole earthly experiment – can’t last much longer.
Earthly destruction or not, the collider is set to be wound down in 2012 for yet more major repairs. Though rest assured, German lady and others: there are plenty more doomsday scenarios scheduled for that year.
See an amazing slideshow of this monster machine and more Large Hadron coverage on Motherboard
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