Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle by Ian Sample (Book review by Graham Farmelo in the Guardian)
Never has so much been expected of a scientific machine. The Large Hadron Collider, 30 years in the planning, promises to shed new light on nature's fundamental laws and particles, thus justifying its multi-billion-dollar price tag to the governments that have footed the bill. "If the Collider doesn't deliver some really sexy discoveries," one of the world's most illustrious experimenters recently whispered to me, "particle physicists will be fucked."….
Predictions are fine, but there are better ways to protect a population (Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” column in the Guardian)
On 6 April 2009, an earthquake registering 6.3 on the … magnitude scale hit the town of L'Aquila in Abruzzo, Italy. This was a tragedy, and hundreds of people died. It would be great if we could have firm predictions about every risk whose rare but tragic outcome cannot be accurately predicted, whether it is a flu outbreak, a murder, an illness, or an earthquake. Most of us recognise that this is impossible.
But some find it harder to accept. The L'Aquila prosecutor's office has now leapt into action. It has a Commissione Grandi Rischi after all – a "Commission on Big Risks" – and it's full of seismologists. If these people can't predict an earthquake, then what's the point of them? And so these seismologists are now being indicted and investigated for manslaughter, on account of their failure to warn the population that an earthquake was coming….
