CERN LHC = danger?

Lien: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24611/

This is a quote from an article published January 5 2010 at Technology Review:

'The physicists have had their say. Now a legal study asks how a court might handle a request to halt a multibillion-dollar particle-physics experiment. The analysis makes for startling reading.

For particle physicists, the Large Hadron Collider is a long-awaited dream that has finally come true. The LHC should supply a steady stream of data for the community to number crunch and that should lead to some fundamental new insights into the nature of the universe. It also guarantees jobs and careers for a generation of physicists around the world.

But there is another group who say that CERN, the organisation that has built and runs the collider, has not done enough to reassure the world that the work is safe. The fear is that the collider can produce black holes that might gobble up the Earth. Various legal actions have failed to halt the work, not because of the scientific or safety issues involved, but because of problems of jurisdiction. CERN has an immunity from court action in its member states and a US court action in Hawaii found that it did not have the jurisdiction to proceed.

Today, we get a fascinating new perspective on the issue from Eric Johnson, an assistant professor of law at the University of North Dakota School of Law in Grand Forks. Johnson asks what a court should do with a preliminary-injunction request to halt a multibillion-dollar particle-physics experiment that plaintiffs claim could create a black hole that will devour the planet.'