I just opened my Sunday New York Times this morning to find a beautiful few pages of the magazine devoted to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The accompanying story*, such as it is, is rather sparse, focusing more on a short photo-essay, with pictures of the detectors like this one (of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector)
However, the article ends with a lovely paragraph that, while missing some caveats about the provisional nature of the statements, I think paints a picture of science and its beauty that many of us wish more people could share
Energy and beauty are deeply linked in contemporary physics. At the highest energies, like those immediately after the Big Bang, perfect symmetry prevails, and all the forces of nature merge into one. As the universe cooled down, this symmetry was broken in various ways, so the world we see around us is, as the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg has put it, “only an imperfect reflection of a deeper and more beautiful reality.” By reaching back toward the primordial energy, the L.H.C. promises to move us a little closer to that reality. This promise is bodied forth in the rounded, symmetrical forms of the collider itself – next to which the Alps, for all their grandeur, look just a little slovenly.
*Update (1/15/2007): I should have mentioned that this nice article was written by Jim Holt. Thanks to George Musser for pointing this out in the comment section.
January 14th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Somewhere (maybe ‘The Pleasure of Being a Physicist’..?) Viktor Weiskopf did a beautiful order-of-magnitude walkthrough from quantum constants… to Pauli exclusion and typical ionic bond strengths… to strength of materials for common minerals like olivine and diorite and granite… to how high mountains can get before their roots begin to flow plastically even faster than erosion wears them down. So ultimately, he concluded, parameters for both the beauty and the “slovenliness” of the Alps are set by the [low-energy limits of] the phenomena in the LHC…
January 14th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
As an aside, you wouldn’t attribute a new research finding in Nature to Nature; you’d name the authors. Similarly, you should name the author of this piece – Jim Holt – rather than simply say it’s in the NYTM. For some reason, science writers are seen as faceless.
George
January 14th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
George: instruments on space missions are sometimes/often ‘faceless’ too!
January 14th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
I can’t believe that the latest version of Windows still doesn’t display your blog correctly — the text from the sidebar creeps well on to the main display. Can’t those jokers at Microsoft get anything right?
January 14th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Thanks for the lecture George, and thanks for supplying the name. I think I’ve included the author’s name in every other post I’ve ever written about a news piece, so this isn’t typical (of me or CV). (I’ve even written pieces about how important science writers are).
January 14th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
The LHC collides at 14 TeV in ~500 days and counting…..and then the world changes.
January 15th, 2007 at 12:11 am
Sorry, Mark, it wasn’t meant to be a “lecture” — though now that I see it on the screen, I admit that it comes across that way. I guess I’ve got a chip on my shoulder about this because things I’ve worked on have been appropriated without credit (hardly a problem unique to science journalism).
George
January 15th, 2007 at 3:44 am
I suppose this is the equivalent of the ubiquitous “Scientists have found…”.
January 15th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Thanks George. You were quite right of course, and I’ve added a line to the article (with a link to Holt’s NYT stories) to make this right. Good science journalism is something that means a lot to me also, which is why I bristled (a little too easily perhaps) at the comment. Thanks sincerely for making sure I did the right thing there.