In spite of all our differences, the one thing that binds all living creatures is that we each have an expiration date. This finality to our existence is what makes life special, something to be cherished and protected. But occasionally things can go terribly wrong…
Could a Welshman be responsible for bringing an early end to the universe? As impossible as it sounds, that is what a U.S. federal court will have to decide in June. Two Americans have filed a lawsuit to stop the £2 billion giant particle accelerator, which will begin smashing protons together this summer at Cern (The European Center for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland.
Former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and botanist Luis Sancho claim the giant accelerator could spit out a strangelet, which could shrink our planet to a dense lump of “strange matter” or produce a black hole that would immediately consume the Earth and continue until the entire universe is destroyed.
But Dr. Lyn Evans, in charge of designing and building Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), said yesterday the doomsday scenarios cannot happen. He said the colliding protons at Cern will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. But since the Earth has been bombarded with similar cosmic rays for millions of years and is still here, Evans says we all have nothing to worry about. Isn’t that what the CEO of Bear-Stearns said just 24 hours before the largest investment bank implosion in history?
