BIGGEST-EVER EXPERIMENT COULD CAUSE END OF THE WORLD
It has cost more than £4billion and is designed to unlock the secrets of the Big Bang.
But rather than providing vital information about the beginning of life, the world's biggest experiment could cause the end of the world.
Scientists fear that the Large Hadron Collider - due to be switched on in just nine days' time - will create a mini-black hole that could swallow the planet and they have applied for a court order to cancel the experiment.
By smashing sub-atomic particles together at speeds close to the speed of light, the LHC aims to recreate the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, shedding light on the building blocks of life.
But critics claim that the 'time machine' which is housed deep underground near Geneva could instead spawn a shower of mini-black holes.
Within just four years, one of these 'celestial vacuums' could have swollen to such a size that it is capable of sucking the Earth inside-out, said Otto Rossler, one of a group of scientists mounting a last-minute court challenge against the project.
They claim the experiment violates the right to life under the European Convention of Human Rights.
Professor Rossler, a German chemist, said the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, has admitted its project create black holes but doesn't consider them to be a risk.
He warned: 'My own calculations have shown it is quite plausible that these little black holes survive and will grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside.
'I have been calling for CERN to hold a safety conference to prove my conclusions wrong but they have not been willing.'
But those involved in the project have dismissed the claims as 'absurd' and insist that extensive safety assessments have found the experiment, which is funded by 20 countries, including the UK, to be safe.
A report written earlier this year stated: 'Over the past billions of years, nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments - and the planet still exists.'
The life span of any mini-black holes would be 'very short', it added.
CERN spokesman James Gillies said the arguments before the European Court of Human Rights had been answered in 'extensive safety assessments'.
He told the Sunday Telegraph: 'The Large Hadron Collider will not be producing anything that does not happen routinely in nature due to cosmic rays.
'If they were dangerous we would know about it already.'
The most powerful physics experiment ever built, the LHC will attempt to recreate the conditions that existed immediately after the birth of the universe, or the Big Bang.
Beams of protons will be propelled through an 18-mile-long circular tunnel lined with powerful magnets designed to accelerate the tiny particles.
When they reach almost the speed of light, they will be smashed head-on into each other, breaking them into their constituent parts, including, perhaps, the building blocks of the universe.
(Sunday Telegraph)
That is weird and scary. Why are they being allowed to mess with all that stuff anyway? They have no right to risk the life of our planet, let alone us.