Giant Particle Accelerator Produces Post-Modern Front-Page Story

David Schatsky | March 31, 2008, 09:44 AM

A story on the front page of the New York Times this weekend about the "Large Hadron Collider" begins:

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

When was the last time you saw a front-page story reference four other stories with which it shared the front page that day? A cool, creepy effect. Nothing like the risks feared by critics of the super-collider, which include

... chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

Interesting reading. The editorial effect of the opening will be lost on readers of the Web edition, though.