"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers..."

That timeless quotation from Shakespeare's Henry VI adequately expresses my current frustration at the news of a lawsuit that's just been filed in Hawaii's US District Court seeking a temporary restraining order against CERN and its partners in building the LHC. They want to postpone start-up preparations for "at least" four months in order to "reassess" the collider's safety. Because, you know, it could destroy the word by creating mini-black holes, magnetic monopoles, or convert all the matter in the universe into exotic strangelets. 

*Cue exasperated eye-rolling* Oh, give me a break. It's basically the latest round of fear-mongering that always seems to accompany the start-up of a new accelerator. In fact, one of the co-plaintiffs is none other than "former nuclear safety officer" Walter Wagner, who spearheaded the attempt to create panic surrounding Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. News flash to Wagner: RHIC has been operating for a few years now. The world has not yet ended.

Wagner's concerns are nothing new to anyone who has followed the development of the LHC's design and construction over the last decade or more. They have been fully and fairly considered by the best scientific minds in the high-energy physics community, who take their responsibility for safety very seriously. And, in fact, an updated safety assessment (the last document was released in 2003) has already been completed. Why bring the courts into it at all? Because Wagner refuses to accept the scientific consensus on the issue.

The LHC has enough problems to overcome this year. The last thing it needs is a frivolous lawsuit.