Rarely has the  New York Times had a more provocative title for an article than “Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More.”  The article describes a suit brought in Hawaii by two men who contend that other scientists have created a machine near Geneva, Switzerland, that can destroy the world.  Totally.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

The Large Hadron Collider certainly doesn’t have a name that suggests doomsday, but real science tends not to be so melodramatic.  On the other hand, the name doesn’t suggest that it’s the best use one could find for $8 billion either, though in the scheme of military warplanes, it’s really not that much money.

Are Wagner and Sancho a pair of nuts who run around screaming “the sky is falling?”  Perhaps.  They previously attacked the Brookhaven National Laboratory to stop it from operating the “Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.”  It’s been running since 2000, and we’re all still here.

But these scientists are on the cutting edge of theory, far beyond the knowledge and understanding of ordinary folks. 

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

So this “black hole” thing isn’t totally off the wall.  While Stephen Hawking is brilliant, are we prepared to stake the continued existence of the world on his say-so?  One mistake in the calculations, and zap.

Where does one go to challenge those on the cutting edge of science when you fear they’ve crossed the line?  Honolulu.  Putting aside the jurisdictional issue, and any other questions as to why Honolulu other than to get a decent tan while fighting for the continued existence of the world, Wagner and Sancho have gone to court to get an injunction against the Large Hadron Collider.  They will ask a judge to rule

There are a few things that courts do well.  Okay, “well” may be subject to dispute, but things that courts are better equipped to handle.  The cutting edge of science is not one of them.  We can barely deal with science when it addresses  what happens inside those black boxes that tell cops about blood alcohol content.  It’s all mumbo jumbo to lawyers, so we hand it over to some theoretically neutral science-type person who tells us if it’s any good or not.  We don’t really have a clue how any of this stuff works.  We’re just lawyers, for crying out loud.

The idea that theoretical physicists will argue the merits of whether the Large Hadron Collider is safe or will destroy the earth to a judge strikes me as ludicrous.  There is no judge on earth competent to understand the argument, no less decide it.  An hour of mumbo jumbo and the judge will be thinking of the back nine, dreaming of that perfect pitch for an eagle, while words like “quark” and “strangelet” sail over his head. 

No doubt the court will fall back on comfortable legal concepts like “burden of proof” to decide to deny the injunction.  How does one meet the standard of proof that this thing will destroy the earth?  It’s not like we have precedent. 

I’m hopeful that the plaintiffs are wrong about this.  Norm Pattis, on the other hand, thinks it might be pretty cool if the end of everything happens in a trillionth of a second as we are all sucked into a black hole.  But Norm tends to be a little more existential than me.  Though, he may have a point when compared to the variety of other ways we can self-destruct.  At least it won’t hurt.

So if the judge in Honolulu rules in favor of CERN and allows the Large Hadron Collider to do its voodoo, and he’s wrong, can the plaintiff’s recover damages?  Lawyers can be so silly at times.  Poof!

Full Disclosure:  As a wayward youth, I was employed as the “warm body” at the Tandem Van de Graaff Accelerator at Rutgers University.  From midnight until 8 am, I babysat this nuclear collider-type thing, keeping awake by playing with the controls, letting frozen hydrogen spill onto the floor and watching the freezing smoke fill the room and hitting tennis balls against the nuclear pile (it was the only free wall in the place).

Law required that someone be present to monitor the nuclear pile at all times.  So they hired a high school kid to do the graveyard shift, since no one else was stupid enough to stay up all night and watch it.  This happened in the days before we had any appreciation of the potential damage a kid like me could do to society.  Nothing melted down or exploded.  I wore a radiation badge just to make sure, which I was told would protect me in case of nuclear accident.  Think about it.

Had something gone awry, I doubt greatly I would have been much help.  But I would have felt really bad about it.

Special Supplement!  For anyone who doubts that lawyers have no business whatsoever making scientific determinations,  here’s a cartoon that makes theoretical physicists laugh out loud.  Enjoy!