Will collider break ground — or destroy the Earth?

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country cannot afford their mortgages and in some places, people cannot even afford rice.

None of this, nor the rest of the grimness on the front page, will matter a bit if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole that will spell the end of the Earth and maybe the universe.

Scientists said that is unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world's physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in which the colliding protons will re-create energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the big bang. Researchers plan to sift the debris from these primordial re-creations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter 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 said, 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.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years, namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether to go ahead.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in U.S. District Court in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the U.S. Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, a lawsuit-scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

"I don't know if they're going to show up," Wagner said. CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court's jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses, they had added CERN to the docket in the United States. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator's massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory had no comment on the suit. "It's hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe," Gillies said.

"There is nothing new to suggest that the LHC is unsafe," he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab April 6.

"Scientifically, we're not hiding away," Gillies said.

But Wagner was not mollified. "They've got a lot of propaganda saying it's safe, but basically it's propaganda," he said.

Physicists in and out of CERN said a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.

"The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots," said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The other members prefer to remain anonymous, Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

This is not the first time around for Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a "quark-gluon plasma," has been operating without incident since 2000.

Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic-ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration.

Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, Wagner said.

The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

What is different, physicists said, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.

The new worries are about black holes some think could appear at the collider.

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

But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Hawking's radiation process was referred to on Wagner's Web site, said they had missed his point.

"Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate," he said. "But it would really, really have to be weird."