COULD a Welshman be responsible for ending the world, then the entire universe?
As bizarre as it sounds, that is what a federal court in the US will have to decide in June.
Two American citizens say the £2bn giant particle accelerator which will begin smashing protons together at Cern (The European Centre for Nuclear Research) near Geneva this summer could end the world and everything outside it.
Former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and botanist Luis Sancho claim in a law suit filed in Hawaii the giant accelerator could spit out something called a Strangelet which could convert our planet to a lump of dense, shrunken “strange matter”.
Or, they claim, it could create a kind of black hole which would start sucking in matter, grow bigger and bigger and never stop.
But 63-year-old Dr Lyn Evans, from Aberdare, in charge of designing and building Cern’s expensive accelerator, known to the experts as a Large Hadron Collider (LHC), said yesterday the doomsday scenarios won’t happen.
He said the colliding protons at Cern will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
His researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to unknown forces and symmetries of nature.
Swansea University physics graduate Dr Evans, a Welsh rugby fan and former Aberdare Grammar School pupil, said “micro black holes” could only be created with the energies of the colliding particles, which were equivalent to the energies of mosquitoes.
The Earth had been bombarded with invisible cosmic rays travelling at huge speeds for millions of years and particles within the cosmic rays were constantly colliding, he said.
“If the LHC can produce microscopic black holes, cosmic rays of much higher energies would already have produced many more.
“Since the Earth is still here, there is no reason to believe that collisions inside the LHC at Cern will be harmful.”
Dr Evans said Mr Wagner had previously filed a law suit objecting to another huge atom smasher, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brooklyn, US, but the claim was dismissed.
The collider has been operating without incident since 2000.
However, the latest lawsuit touches on an issue which has bothered scholars and scientists for decades, namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.
The suit, filed on March 21 in the Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting Cern from proceeding with the accelerator until it can prove safety.
A spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, said a scheduling meeting had been set for June 16.
But Cern, an organisation of European nations based in Switzerland, is only co-operating on a voluntary basis. Dr Evans said officials at Cern would explain its safety reasoning to Mr Wagner and Mr Sancho in the coming weeks.
Dr Evans, who has been based at Cern since shortly after graduating from Swansea University in 1969, will give the go-ahead for the 28-mile circumference LHC to begin experiments next month.
Its unique technology will make it 100 times more powerful than Cern’s existing accelerator, thanks to immense magnetic fields produced by superconducting magnets.
The LHC will generate data at a rate equal to the entire human population each making 10 telephone calls – simultaneously.
Dr Evans said of his 14-year work on the LHC: “I’ve been around a long time and seen big projects, but when I go into that tunnel I feel really overawed. Day to day I run a lab with 2,500 staff – which is huge.
“I also oversee the co-ordination between all the other organisations building components for the accelerator and engineers worldwide.
“My job involves quite a bit of travel.
“Recently, I met the President of China and thought to myself, ‘Not bad for a bloke from Aberdare!’”
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