Experimento problemático

Eric E. Johnson examina os riscos da pesquisa com o LHC da CERN e pergunta se tem limites para experimentos nas ciências:
"... Underneath the countryside of Switzerland and France is the largest
machine ever built.1 Seventeen miles around2 and requiring as much electricity
as a medium-sized city,3 it is designed to create conditions hotter than any star
in our galaxy.4 The thousands of scientists hovering over the device hope that
when it reaches full power it will create particles that have not existed since the
time of the Big Bang.5 Modestly named the “Large Hadron Collider” (“LHC”),
the machine will be the most ambitious scientific experiment in humanity’s history.
The physics community is abuzz. Scientists everywhere are hoping to see
something they have never seen before. Some are expecting to find the elusive
Higgs boson.6 Others are looking for the dark matter that holds together the
cosmos.7 Still others hope to see, in the tracers of subatomic shrapnel, the
telltale signs of a microscopic black hole as it evaporates into nothingness.8
Not everyone, however, is giddy with excitement. In particular, it is that
last bit—about black holes—that has some people worried. An unhappy few
are concerned that black holes produced by the LHC might not vanish, as
expected.9 Instead, it is feared, they might linger.10 And grow.
Our planet, and everyone on it, detractors say, could be reduced to an
infinitesimal lightless speck.11
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0912/0912.5480.pdf