As most people who would visit this blog are probably aware, the Large Hadron Collider, a facility straddling the Swiss-French border that will host the highest-energy physics experiments ever, is scheduled to begin data collection at some point in the relatively near future (official LHC website, Wikipedia page).
In anticipation of the LHC's opening for research, two major publications from the Big Apple, the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine, have each published major articles on the collider in recent days. The two articles are very similar contentwise -- each covering both the physical construction and science of the LHC -- and lengthwise (prepare to block out some time to read either).
New York Times articles tend to be taken down from the web fairly quickly, so the best online option would probably be to seek out the piece on Lexis/Nexis at a library that subscribes to this service ("A Giant Takes On Physics’ Biggest Questions," by Dennis Overbye, May 15, 2007). I'm not sure how long the New Yorker makes its articles available free, full-text, but here it is, for now at least.
Peter Woit, whose "Not Even Wrong" blog (associated with his book of the same name) I read frequently, questions the timing of this media barrage:
I do fear all this LHC coverage is peaking too early. With still probably at least a year to go before the machine even starts taking data, the coverage may already be generating an LHC overexposure problem...
For the last several months, I have been collecting articles to do my own series of postings on the LHC. On the positive side, I think the NYT and New Yorker articles will motivate me to get my stuff up here "sooner rather than later."
Over the next few months, you can expect a new posting here every couple of weeks. The topics I plan to address in my series include:
*What is a particle-physics collider, in the first place?
*Energy aspects of the LHC (why high energies are needed and how they are achieved).
*Another important aspect of a collider, its luminosity.
*How the data are detected, collected, and interpreted.
*How the various LHC studies might (or might not) inform several theoretical proposals of the Standard Model and beyond, including Higgs physics, supersymmetry, and extra dimensions.