I have to agree with kgiessler that if the engineers and physicists that have been working on this and have the most expertise in this area have no worries regarding the integrity of the experiments being done, then why does it have to be stopped?
They used a layman's term to describe what was being generated and suddenly all the stories of a child's youth and imagination take over and the world is going to end due to a subatomic gravitational entity who's expected life duration is minuscule. If they want to try to capture the Higgs boson, this symmetrical subatomic particle and believe it could lead to the harnessing and understanding of dimensions and gravity loss, let them.
Who knows what the knowledge could lead to.
The "black hole" uproar is certainly an overreaction, because the physicists working on this project know pretty much exactly how these tiny black holes will behave; they've seen things like them in previous lower-energy experiments, and the theoretical understanding of how black holes work is quite solid.
There
is an actual potential threat with these super-high-energy particle colliders, though, and it doesn't exactly relate to the microscopic black holes. This machine's entire purpose is to mimic, for the briefest of intervals, at the smallest possible scale, the energy circumstances of the Big Bang. While the scientists know to some mind-boggling level of certainty that nothing terrible will happen even if they're successful, no one actually has any idea what the results of a successful near-Big-Bang experiment will be. There is a non-zero chance that the "perfect" LHC experiment will cause an
actual Big Bang, or something like it.
If that happens, no one knows for sure (yet again, not necessarily a problem, but plenty of uncertainty) what will happen, but it's possible that such a "New Big Bang" could swallow up the known universe at a faster-than-light-speed, expansionary rate. That's probably not even the likely outcome IF a New Big Bang were to happen, which has only an infinitesimal chance in the first place, but it's not impossible. Not a reason to avoid the research, but still a little scary.
And I love the justification in a few of these articles questioning the experiment because why should money be spent in the pursuit of knowledge when it should be spent on trying to make our lives easier. What a load of complete crap that is. With all the money that is wasted by people and governments today, people are questioning the use of funds to increase humankind's knowledge and understanding of the universe.
It doesn't matter that this experiment could lead to the understanding of some new energy source, dimensional travel through space, or any one of a million other uses most science fiction novels describe. No what's important is that when I drive in a tunnel and am illegally talking on a cell phone while driving, I still get crystal clear reception.
Unreal.
I'm all for spending whatever money can be gathered on high-level science, but ANY potential practical outcome of the LHC experimentation is a pretty disingenuous argument. Almost no one associated with the project actually expects to learn anything that will have realistic a practice use. That's OK, but it's true that this is almost purely an intellectual exercise.
That's not to say that the money should be focused on consumer-level research like cell phone reception, though. If international governments are going to be spending the kind of money that Europe did on the LHC, it makes far more sense to focus on space exploration (more substantial unmanned missions to the other planets and probably more importantly the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, deeper examination of the comet belts, etc.) coupled with new space-entry technology and engineering (a new space launch vehicle, or a space elevator, a geostationary satellite with a cable tethered to the Earth's surface, allowing payloads to be moved beyond the Earth's gravitational sphere with something more like a train or elevator car than a much-less-efficient rocket).
Space exploration would potentially benefit many branches of science, multiple types of physics as well as biology, geology, medicine, etc., rather than particle physics alone, and could also provide more immediate real-world benefits in the form of easy solar power, natural resources from asteroids, etc.
China seems to be focusing their science and technology funding in this direction already, and if they succeed, while Europe and the US spend the majority of their high-level science resources on things like particle colliders, the western world could be left behind in their scientific ivory towers.
