May 23, 2008
This summer, in a 17-mile long tunnel outside Geneva, Switzerland, a particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider is gearing up to smash protons at nearly the speed of light. Physicists hope it will help solve mysteries of the universe and lead to an elusive Unified Theory. Studio 360's Eric Molinsky looks into the colorful and complex design of the largest machine on the planet.
I would have appreciated something a bit more descriptive than metaphoric. The allusions to sci fi are captivating, but in the end they left me both uncomfortable and unsatisfied. Rather than have the associated physicists provide impressionistic sound bites, it would have been helpful to have them try to describe why the metaphoric allusions made sense to them, not just that they somehow rang "true" - in effect you are preserving or even intensifying the mystique rather than trying to be helpful to make physics accessible. Too bad.
The story of how the collider was built in switzerland and not the United States is a more significant story . We here in america have lost our so called "leading edge" in research and development in pure science. Good story, the scientific details are available elsewhere.
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