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Comment and Space

Is Big Physics peddling science pornography?

By Michael Hanlon

6 February 2008

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Is Big Physics guilty of sexing-up, drifting away from the realm of hard data and into the softer universe of science pornography?

IF SOME Russian mathematicians are right, then 2008 will be a year to remember. Extraordinary as it sounds, this could be when humanity unwittingly creates its first time machine and we receive our first visitors from the future – presumably wearing, as future-fashion dictates, silver jumpsuits and driving flying cars.

These theorists speculate that at the much-delayed opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN on the French-Swiss border, the assembled scientists and dignitaries may be treated to…

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