Woman, fearing apocalypse, tries to halt collider
A woman appeals to the highest court in Germany to get the Large Hadron Collider stopped. The court decides she has no proof of any impending doom.
Sooner or later, it will all end. Hopefully, this will be before the "Singularity" folks fulfill their metallic dreams.
A woman in Germany, however, fears the end really is very nigh indeed. So, according to the Telegraph, she went to her country's most exalted court to get its judges to understand just how nigh our final breaths are.
The court didn't disclose her name, nor is there any evidence that she was wearing a sandwich board during her appeal. Her fears, though, surround the Large Hadron Collider, situated beneath the border of France and Switzerland. This troubling and troubled experiment seems to have enjoyed more stops and starts than your average New York traffic light.
Some find the essence of searching for the God particle an excessively ambitious pursuit for mere mortals. Especially European ones who make YouTube videos. Others are concerned that if a baguette dropped by a bird can halt this scientific wonder, then what catastrophe might some more nefarious animals achieve. One collider physicist has reportedly been arrested on terrorism charges.
The woman seemed to believe that she had a chance of stopping the collider because Germany is a member of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research that is heading up the experiment.
But what seems clear is that the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe had deaf ears to the woman's pleas for the Earth's salvation. It declared that the worried plaintiff was "unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about."
Of course her account might have seemed incoherent. She's frightened. I fear, too, that her nightmares of humanity being sucked into a vast black hole might have accessed new dimensions since the case was decided.
You see, Agence France-Presse reports that by the first few days of April, the collider will be wound up to hitherto unprecedented levels of power. 7.0 TeV (teraelectronvolts), for those who are excited by such things.
Oh, world. It was good to know you. Especially on sunny days.