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What Gail Collins feared in an earlier post is now a reality: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN (http://www.cern.ch) is now operational. (That last link, by the way, is to the first website ever to exist--the World Wide Web was born at CERN.)
Brian Greene, professor of physics at Columbia and a famous science popularizer, discusses what the LHC may or may not find in this Op-Ed piece for the New York Times.
Stanley Fish writes about clarity of expression with his usual thoughtfulness and clarity. A compelling explanation (before the fact) of the result of the 2004 election.
An article by Tom Bissell in Harper's Magazine about the end of the Earth.
L. N. Trefethen's proposal for a new academic practice. This should be of interest not just to mathematicians and computer scientists, but also to aspiring theorists.
Alan Weisman's article in Discover was later expanded into a book, The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2007), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
John Tierney begins a recent essay thus:
As further proof of the intelligence — and courage — of Lab readers, more than 100 submitted answers to the Presidential Physics Quiz created by Richard Muller, the Berkeley physicist.
Tierney is a New York Times writer. His blog TierneyLab intends "to check out new research and rethink conventional wisdom about science and society."
Gail Collins's column in the New York Times sounds like (and, in my view, is) a trivialization of high-energy physics. On the other hand, it poses a good question: how exactly is a particle accelerator supposed to create a black hole that will swallow the Earth?
