"IT COULD DESTROY THE EARTH" Big Bang at the atomic lab after scientists get their maths wrong

An American and a Spaniard have launched a lawsuit to stop scientists from firing up a machine they fear could destroy not just life on Earth but the planet itself.

A £2 billion project to answer some of the biggest mysteries of the universehas been delayed by months after scientists building it made basic errors intheir mathematical calculations.

The mistakes led to an explosion deep in the tunnel at the Cern particleaccelerator complex near Geneva in Switzerland. It lifted a 20-ton magnetoff its mountings, filling a tunnel with helium gas and forcing anevacuation.

It means that 24 magnets located all around the 17-mile circular acceleratormust now be stripped down and repaired or upgraded. The failure is a hugeembarrassment for Fermilab, the American national physics laboratory thatbuilt the magnets and the anchor system that secured them to the machine.

It appears Fermilab made elementary mistakes in the design of the magnets andtheir anchors that made them insecure once the system was operational.

Last week an apparently furious and embarrassed Pier Oddone, director ofFermilab, wrote to his staff saying they had caused “a pratfall on the worldstage”. He said: “We are dumb-founded that we missed some very simplebalance of forces. Not only was it missed in the engineering design but alsoin the four engineering reviews carried out between 1998 and 2002 beforelaunching the construction of the magnets.”

When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.

Scientists in Geneva are readying the largest particle accelerator ever built. But BPP regular David Morgan says at least two men are suing to stop the accelerator because they fear it will swallow all of planet Earth.

The £4.4 billion new particle accelerator, which is buried 300 ft beneath the Alpine foothills along the Swiss French border, is 17 miles long and up to 12 stories high. It can generate temperatures of a trillion degrees centigrade.