Large Hadron Collider Alive and Well

This article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/science/space/02cern.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=science

    The Large Hadron Collider has received a lot of attention from the science news press in the past couple years, probably because scientists believe it will solve some of the greatest mysteries of the universe, such as the Higgs boson and dark matter. But since it’s been subject to repair and rigorous testing ever since the disastrous malfunction in 2008, and has been out of the press for a while, the time is right for this feature piece by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times, wherein he gives a review of the machine and discusses its recent successes, failures, and goals.

    However, none of it is all that exciting. Sure, the guys at “the Large Hadron Collider finally got five trillion high-energy particles under control, squeezed and tweaked them into tight bunches and started banging them together,” but no data has been processed yet and it appears that no interesting discoveries in the world of physics have yet been made. The piece is mostly filled with statements of excitement from many of the physicists/scientists involved with CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, and indeed, the title is “Trillions of Reasons to be Excited.” But that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad story. Overbye writes exceptionally as always, and the piece is exciting to anybody interested in physics; but it is a shame that Overbye was probably instructed to write a feature of a certain length, when a more concise story may have been more powerful and engaging to general audiences.