Surprising Science — March 31, 2010

Worlds Collide

It cost $10 billion and took 16 years, but the Large Hadron Collider finally went into operation yesterday in Switzerland — and the world didn’t end after all.

bigthinkeditor

It cost $10 billion and took 16 years, but the Large Hadron Collider finally went into operation yesterday in Switzerland — and the world didn’t end after all. Scientists are hoping to figure out the nature of so-called “dark matter” as well as the Higgs boson — a hypothetical elementary particle that may explain the origin of mass. “We are on this planet and in this universe a short time,” wrote Michael Barnett, a physicist from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The dreams of a lifetime are waiting, and hopefully not much longer.”

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

▸

7 min

—

with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

Up Next

Guest Thinkers

After Condé Nast: One Editor’s Goodbye to All That

Dominique Browning’s book, excerpted in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, will tell her story. Her story is more than just this, but it begins with this: she was the extremely […]