There’s a big long Dennis Overbye article about the Large Hadron Collider in the Times today. The paginated version runs to seven or eight pages on the web, and Overbye is a good writer, so you can be fairly sure it’s exhaustive and detailed and interesting.
I can’t say that authoritatively, though, because I got about five paragraphs in, and gave up. I’m officially sick of rapturous articles about the LHC, which isn’t going to turn on for several months yet, assuming everything goes smoothly.
Yeah, yeah, it’ll address the most fundamental questions in physics, it’ll provide an unprecedented opportunity to understand the Big Bang, it’s the best hope for resolving outstanding issues about particle physics. Blah, blah, blah. It’s also not running yet. Wake me when there’s data.
There are a whole host of fascinating physics experiments going on right now that are actually, you know, going on right now. Such as, to pull a few things from the huge backlog of saved posts in my RSS feeds, this, this, this, and this. Or, for example, there’s the entire conference Doug Natelson is at. Write about those for a change.