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.
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There is a certain techy pleasure in reading about the hardware. Re-reading stuff about the Standard Model and so on, that's less than exciting (although neither of us are the intended audience for the piece, of course).
It seems to me that the public genuinely are most interested in a relatively narrow range of physics.
Talk about perfect timing! My "Quantum Physics for Poets" students just had a final paper on the LHC due YESTERDAY. Thank God this article came out after the due date... I'd hate to read 16 papers all plagiarizing the same source.
There was an episode of a Discovery channel program recently, Megabuilers or something like that. They showed a lot of the civil engineering that's going into building the ATLAS experiment.
Not exactly sure why I brought that up, except that Chad mentioned that the machine is still being built. I thought it was a great program to have during the building phase.
Yeah, the New Yorker just had a huge article about LHC within the past week or two. And SEED wrote about it in the fall. I assume that it's been done in the traditional science magazines, too.
I mean, I know it's big and all, so you can't not write about it--but if everyone's written an article about it, what's new to say? Maybe it's supposed to help convince everyone that all the expense that's going into just ticking off the last box to validate the Standard Model is actually worth it. If we're really, really lucky, maybe the physicists might even see something unexpected. Now that would be news!
I don't agree that the purpose of the LHC is "ticking off the last box" on the standard model (indisputably it will be able to fill in that box, whatever is there, but that's not the main motivation). The purpose of the LHC is to experimentally study a regime of nature that we have never directly studied before. It will have an order of magnitude larger reach in energy, or mass, than any accelerator that has gone before, and that's what has people excited. And this mass range is more than randomly interesting. Not only will it answer the "how" of electroweak symmetry breaking, but it should also begin to address the "why there?" question (the hierarchy problem, see Dorrigo's blog for a nice discussion of this at a non-technical level). It also has a good chance of producing and studying the particles that compose the "dark matter" (as opposed to "dark energy") of the universe [dark matter composes about one quarter of the energy content of the universe, whereas all the stuff that we have ever studied up to now is about three percent or so]. Either dark matter is cosmologically produced as a thermal relic, in which case you can predict the astrophysical relic densities, which give the right amount for a dark matter particle with weak interactions and a mass in the LHC range, or it's a non-thermal relic for which there is no reason to have a density in the observed range. Basically, if it's a thermal relic we'll be able to discover it at the LHC.
Is it overexposed in the popular press? I think that that depends on what you are comparing to. Certainly there is much other physics that is beautiful, and surprising, and doesn't get the popular exposure that it deserves: the stunning recent advances in ultraprecise atomic physics, quantum phase transitions, BEC, mesoscopic systems,... these (and many others) all deserve wider public exposure than they get. But on the other hand, compared to the obsession science journalists seem to have with implausible, and entirely untested, models of particle theory, it's nice to see articles on the experiments that will actually teach us something about how particles behave, and give us real data rather than random speculation.
I don't think that it's an obsession that science journalists have; I think that they're merely feeding public obsessions, which is how they get paid.
I don't know with any certainty what the LHC will achieve (that's not any sort of a negative statement, just an expression of my ignorance); in particular, I don't know if what it finds will be interesting enough to drive funding for the ILC. The times are interesting, at least.