Physicists the world over are getting very emotional as The Day approaches, but all is not well in the particle physics world.

The world's most powerful particle smasher is due to begin hurling protons at each other at its base outside Geneva this summer, in the search for the Higgs Boson* and other exotica.

Physicists hope that the device, which has taken 14 years and £4 billion to build, will provide clues to the universe's origins by mimicking its condition a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. However, a spanner has been flung in the works (only metaphorically thus far).

Walter Wagner, who runs a botanical garden on Hawaii's Big Island, and Luis Sancho, a Spaniard, have asked for an injunction to prevent the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) starting up the Large Hadron Collider.

Although CERN scientists have already ruled out the possibility in a safety review, Mr Wagner and Mr Sancho say there is at least a small chance of total annihilation of the planet and maybe the universe.

They claim Cern has under-played the chances that the collider could produce a tiny black hole or a particle called a "killer strangelet" that would suck CERN and most of Switzerland or even whole Earth into it.

A spokesman for Cern said the lawsuit's claims were "complete nonsense". "Much higher energy collisions than those at the LHC occur in nature, because cosmic ray particles zip around our galaxy at close to the speed of light," he said.

"The moon has undergone such collisions for five billion years without being devoured by a ravenous black hole or killer strangelet."

Of course the scientists at CERN are not likely to be worrying over much about their professional reputations, since there will be no-one around to criticize if they are wrong, so they would say that wouldn't they?

Anyway, I'll come back to this subject in the autumn (probably)...

* in case you have forgotten, the Higgs Boson is postulated to be the particle that gives all other particles their mass. It has been dubbed, tongue in cheek, 'The God Particle' because it is fundamental to everything yet has never been observed.