14 DAY TRIAL // Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho, the two plaintiffs who sued CERN to stop inauguration of the Large Hadron Collider, couldn't take “no” for an answer when their first attempt at shutting down the world's best particle accelerator failed, so they decided to take their case to the court of appeals. The two filed a complaint with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, and are now trying to bring forth new pieces of evidence, designed to persuade the federal government to intervene in Europe and stop the LHC.
Naturally, their endeavor has little odds of succeeding, mostly because there are no sound scientific facts to support their claims that a black hole will form at the center of the LHC when two super-accelerated particle beams will collide. Numerous studies on the matter have been conducted over the years by various research teams from Europe, the US, as well as other countries participating in the project. None of them has yielded even the most remote hint that the facility, let alone Earth, is in danger.
Chances are that, if the two are not convinced by the tens of studies put at their disposal, they won't be persuaded by anything. Every great invention has its critics, and it's only natural for some people to want to get their 15 minutes of fame, even though they have nothing real to say. During the previous trial, the judge informed them that the US had little jurisdiction over what's going on in Europe, and that America did not hold a seat in the CERN council, which took all the decisions on the LHC.
Wagner and Sancho also argued that one of the main reasons why the US would have jurisdiction to stop the opening of the large particle accelerator would be that the country paid more than $531 million in the financial assistance of the project, and also offered valuable expertise on various issues through its researchers. But the judge maintained that the money paid by America paled in comparison to the (by some estimates) €10 billion ($12,85 billion) the Europeans invested in the project.
No one really knows where the idea of a black hole forming in the LHC has come from, but it seems to have caught on quick, with many people terrified of the particle accelerator simply because they cannot understand the level of physics on which these types of machines operate.