The Ultimate Promise and Peril Debate for Technology

The International Herald Tribune reports that some claim a new particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider poses a possible danger to Earth’s existence. Two men are suing the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, claiming that there is a possibility that the accelerator could create a black hole which would swallow the Earth. Their claim, which they are pursuing in a Hawaii court, is that scientists have not sufficiently taken safety and environmental dangers into account. The situation brings to the fore the difficulty of weighing benefits from scientific experimentation with possible risks, an issue that is relevant in a wide variety of scientific endeavors.