PG of bertrandrussell.blogspot.com asked me to comment about the “end of the world” suit (probably because I’m a particle physics geek and I’ve done research for CERN and other particle accelerators).
For those of you who haven’t seen the complaint, the NYTimes explains it here. Essentially the claim is that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is the new particle accelerator at CERN, will cause the world to end. My first thought upon hearing this lawsuit was that cosmic rays are significantly more energetic than anything that will be produced at CERN. These cosmic rays happen all the time, and there are quite a few labs around the world attempting to measure these interactions. Apparently this is the obvious response, since Nima Arkani-Hamed says the same thing within the article.
Without going into the physics of it, the densities of the particle interactions created at CERN are massive. Seriously massive. However, physicists are fairly certain of the densities required to produce a black hole (gravity becomes so strong at a density of around 10^97 kg/m^3 that space-time essentially breaks down). Nothing is going to produce these kinds of densities at the LHC.
So my thoughts? 12(b)(6) or summary judgment for CERN. There shouldn’t be any factual dispute and expert affidavits seem likely to convince the court that there is no real threat being produced by the LHC that doesn’t already exist in nature. The counter-argument that conservation of momentum will keep particles relatively stationary (so that we can measure them) is baseless because whether the particles are stationary or moving (in the case of cosmic ray collisions) the end result is going to be the same.
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