Today two of my non-scientist friends independently pointed out this story in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html
I don’t want to devote many words further raising the profile of these ideas when they have already been deconstructed elsewhere – for example, the NYT article provided this link:
http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/respectable-physicists-gone-crackpotty/
The thing that got me was that this was in the NYT, and written by a physics graduate journalist. I don’t understand the motivation behind the article – I honestly can’t tell if Overbye is taking the ideas seriously, or it’s just a long-winded attempt to make a bad joke about being a Red Sox fan (that punchline at least makes the whole thing sound more like astrology than science). Anyway, a bad week for science journalism – though from the way this one has spread around the web, a good one for tabloid journalism. Is it still true that any publicity is good publicity?
