Big bang machine 'absolutely safe'
Scientists insist the most powerful particle accelerator ever built is "absolutely safe".
Concerns have been voiced over the £5 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which will be switched on this Wednesday
The machine, to be based underground on the Swiss-French border, will smash protons - one of the building blocks of matter - into each other at energies up to seven times greater than any achieved before.
In the flashes from the collisions, they expect to reproduce conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang at the dawn of creation.
Professor Otto Rossler, a German chemist from a group of scientists mounting a last-minute court challenge to the project, has expressed worries about the creation of black holes.
Scientists believe microscopic black holes might be generated in the machine. But according to the predictions, they will blink in and out of existence before anything scary happens.
Prof Rossler believes it is quite possible that the black holes made in the LHC will grow uncontrollably and "eat the planet from the inside".But Particle physicist Dr James Gillies, a spokesman for the project, said: "We have received a lot of worried calls from people about it.
"There's nothing to worry about, the LHC is absolutely safe, because we have observed nature doing the same things the LHC will do. Protons regularly collide in the earth's upper atmosphere without creating black holes."
The experiments could help scientists find answers to some of the biggest questions in physics, such as why the universe looks the way it does, and how to explain mass, gravity and mysterious "dark matter".
