FRANCE-SWITZERLAND 21 October 2008 CERN inaugurates Large Hadron Collider

CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, has invited heads of government to the official inauguration of the massive US $2 billion Large Hadron Collider. It was switched on with fanfare in September, but broke down days later because of a wiring problem. The collider will simulate the beginning of the universe in microcosm, potentially confirming "the God particle” along the way and making the Internet obsolete.

Around 19 years in the making, the LHC, the largest scientific instrument ever made, is housed in a 27-kilometre circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border.

The Tevatron, housed in the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago in the United States, will become the world's second most powerful particle collider when the LHC is completed.

The LHC, a project involving scientists from dozens of countries and universities, will raise protons to energies approaching seven trillion electron volts before slamming them together in an attempt to produce elementary particles that would help move scientists closer to a Grand Unified Theory of physics.

Nobel laureate Leon Lederman has dubbed the theoretical Higgs boson “the God particle” because its discovery could unify understanding of particle physics and help humans “know the mind of God.”

Switching on the collider launches a new superfast Internet called The Grid. It utilizes modern routing centers, dedicated fiber optic cables and over 50,000 servers. The main purpose of The Grid is to track data associated with the Big Bang project, but the idea is that it could ultimately replace the Internet for everything from HD video telephony to the transmission of holographic images.

Walter Wagner, a former radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration who studied physics at University of California–Berkeley, and Luis Sancho, a self-professed time-theory researcher, believe the LHC experiments could destroy the universe and have filed suit filed in federal court in Hawaii against CERN to halt LHC construction until their safety concerns are answered.

Wagner and Sancho say the collider experiments could produce dangerous materials as well elementary particles, including altered subatomic particles that would change the earth into a dense mass of exotic “strange matter.” They also say the creation of mini black holes inside the accelerator could grow to consume the earth or even the entire universe.

The University of California's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) is one of the defendants in the lawsuit. Wagner unsuccessfully filed a similar lawsuit in 1999 to stop operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The Brookhaven facility has operated without incident. UPDATED Oct/08

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