Atom smasher won't destroy Earth: court

A woman concerned that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will create black holes and destroy the Earth lost a court appeal to shut the atom smasher down on Tuesday.

According to Phys Org, a higher administrative court in Muenster, Germany, rejected the German citizen's claims that the LHC, as it is known, will destroy the planet. The woman's attempts have also been rejected by a court in Switzerland.

"In view of the CERN safety reports for the years 2003 and 2008, a hazard of the proton accelerator LHC according to the state of science is impossible," writes the Justice Ministry of north Rine-Westphalia, translated from German by Google. (The LHC is located at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN.)

1. Science news from NBCNews.com

   1. Sun's heavenly halo lights up the Arctic

      Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: Is this heaven? No, it's Greenland ? lit up by a display of refracted sunlight. 'Tis the season for stunning atmospheric effects, and not just in the Arctic.

   2. Kilauea lava lake hits record height
   3. Rare frog sports thumb-spikes for sex and combat
   4. Dome-headed dinos battled with their heads

The LHC sits on the border between France and Switzerland. It consists of a 17-mile-long underground ring lined with more than 9,000 magnets designed to smash particles together at high speeds. The purpose is to solve mysteries about the Big Bang, the origins of mass, and other basic physics questions. Most recently, the collider has been in the news for possibly discovering the Higgs Boson, a particle that theoretically gives other particles mass.

Before the atom smasher whirled to life in 2010, a number of LHC opponents raised fears that the instrument would have catastrophic consequences. A popular notion, that the collider would create mini black holes that would suck up the Earth, has been dismissed by experts as impossible. Even if the collider did manage to create a microscopic black hole, researchers have found that it would evaporate within one-trillionth or one-millionth of a second.?

Another theory, that the LHC might produce a strangelet, a theoretical particle that would then convert everything it touched into more strangelets, has been likewise dismissed. Such theories have lost steam in the wake of two years of uneventful research at the LHC.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience@livescience. We're also on Facebook &Google+.

? 2012 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49483243/ns/technology_and_science-science/

madonna halftime show linsanity the alamo anencephaly tesla model x lou gehrig toby mac