The federal lawsuit against the world's largest particle-smasher may have been thrown out of court last year, but the plaintiffs have since filed an appeal, arguing that the judge was wrong when she said the U.S. legal system had no jurisdiction over the European science experiment.

The two plaintiffs, retired nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho, had argued that full-scale operations at the Large Hadron Collider carried a risk of creating globe-gobbling black holes or other cosmic catastrophes. Those fears have been knocked down in a series of safety studies and research papers - including one that was put out just a couple of weeks ago.

Nevertheless, Sancho and Wagner are soldiering on.

Less than a month after U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor dismissed the case in Honolulu back in September, the plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Their first brief in the case was due this week, and in that document, Sancho and Wagner take issue with Gillmor's ruling that the federal government did not play a major role in the European-led project. A copy of the brief was forwarded to me by James Tankersley, whose LHC Facts Web site is sympathetic to the plaintiffs' cause.

The brief rehashes the plaintiffs' worries about the collider. For a review of the scientific issues, you can check out this "Discovery or Doom" story, part of our special report on "The Big Bang Machine." But because the case was thrown out on legal rather than scientific grounds, the bulk of this week's brief dwells on the legal issues.

In a nutshell, the plaintiffs say the federal government's contribution of $531 million to LHC construction over more than 11 years, plus the U.S. consultative role on the project, are factors that add up to a "major federal action."

The judge ruled that the involvement was not a major federal action because the United States was not a voting member of Europe's CERN research council, and because the $531 million paled in comparison with CERN's $5 billion-plus contribution. (Most estimates currently run even higher, to a total construction cost of $10 billion.)

Judge Gillmor said that if the U.S. participation did not rise to the level of a major federal action, the federal court system did not have jurisdiction. At the end of her ruling, she strongly hinted that if the LHC's detractors wanted to stop U.S. involvement in the project, their main recourse should be to sway Congress. The plaintiffs, however, want the case to proceed in federal court.

The brief may be posted at some point to Wagner's LHCDefense Web site. Federal attorneys are due to file their own brief next month. Meanwhile, repairs are continuing on the LHC's magnet ring, which broke down shortly after its official startup in September. CERN says the repairs should be finished sometime this summer, leading to the collider's restart.

If this case follows the pattern set by Wagner's earlier challenges of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, the latest appeal is likely to be turned down on narrow legal grounds, perhaps even before the restart. There are likely to be multiple motions ahead, however.

In their brief, the plaintiffs say they want more hearings on the LHC's risks, and they won't be satisfied unless the LHC's experiments "can be proven to be impossible to destroy the Earth." The theoretical and experimental assurances that have been provided so far aren't good enough for them - and they may never be, when you consider how loath physicists are to say anything is absolutely impossible.

Useless. Not only will this not prevent this project from continuing, it just wastes our tax payers time and money to allow these people to try.

First off its not clear that any size singularity will be created.

Calling a singularity smaller then the wave length of light a black hole is also quite ill informed.

Secondly if the particle collider DOES actually create these tiny singularities then so does cosmic rays that are pounding our atmosphere all the time . . . .

Tell me, if the hypothetical singularity that is created in the atmosphere at higher energies then what the LHC will create is not stable enough to eat the atmosphere and go on getting bigger and shoot down on its initial path toward the earth to eat our planet, then why would smaller less energetic singularities that we create underground be any more stable?

Also if this is going on everywhere particle interactions at this energy are occurring then why is there anything left in the universe? Shouldn't everything be gobbled up in a singularity due to the amazing quantity of high energy particle interactions that happen every pico second just in our galaxy?


Rubbish.

The big fish eats the little fish.

just sayin.

Earth? An atom smasher has a potential to destroy the whole solar system.

(I think they ares Smashing protons, not atoms.)

Higgs bosons aside, Dr Saavedra says the LHC experiment is very important to him.

"It pretty much will define my career," he said.

He has been working towards this experiment for 10 years.

Like other Australian participants, Dr Saavedra and Dr Varvell will use data collected by the LHC's ATLAS detector, components of which were built in Australia.

The detector will take snapshots of what happens when protons are smashed together at nearly the speed of light.

When the protons collide they recreate - at a very small scale and for very brief moments in time - conditions similar to that which existed shortly after the Big Bang.

Under these conditions, energy is condensed into one point and this allows new particles to be created.

From the data gathered, researchers will able to track the evolution of known particles from other, as yet unknown particles.

"It's a bit like detective work," Dr Saavedra said.

"When you put everything together the new particle will stand out because it will be different."

Scientists can use this process to help study the evolution of the universe and the nature of matter.

"There's lots of very sexy, different theories that the LHC will either be able to provide hints for or actually disprove," Dr Saavedra said.

This is terribly silly. If the prosecutors did their research, they'd realize that if this particle smasher does, in fact, create black holes (only one of the theoretical outcomes of this experiment), it would imply that tiny black holes are being generated all the time everywhere, just as new subatomic particles form and disappear all around us due to random collisions.

At least this is my understanding of that particular particle accelerator experiment as explained to me by my physics teacher last semester...

Hardly a cause for alarm.

Correct, the energies that will be attained at the LHC pale in comparison to some of the high energy cosmic rays that shoot into our atmosphere all the time.

We have detectors now that analyze this data from these high energy cosmic rays, HOWEVER we cannot get good enough reads on it because we cannot setup the same kind of massive detectors in the atmosphere nor can we control the way in which those collisions take place.

The fact is the only way to be able to analyze the data is by building a giant detector the various detectors LHC has at its disposal. They have to be right on top of the action to get a good read.

Common logic and having read up on the situation tend to take this from a doomsday scenario to a thoughtful experiment.