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Legal News

: Lawbeat

On the docket: TRO against doomsday

By Mark Obbie

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Dennis Overbye, the Times' deputy science editor, deftly and entertainingly meshes the science of physics with the mechanics of law in this front-pager today. He writes about a quirky lawsuit in a Hawaii federal court that seeks to shut down the Large Hadron Collider, which this summer is to begin smashing protons to study the most basic elements of the natural world. Either that or they'll be destroying all of creation. Overbye writes of the plaintiffs, whom he profiles briefly, that they . . .

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 say, 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.”

Overbye, a longtime science writer who has a physics degree from M.I.T., deals in a brief but sophisticated way with questions of legal jurisdiction and the federal regulations and authorities involved. Mostly, though, he takes this for what it is: an unorthodox way to debate science. And he shows that expert writers from any beat can have brainy fun with courthouse news.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on March 29, 2008 (boomark / email).