If you’ve been near any form of media over the last few days, you’re probably aware that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has been turned back on after three years of maintenance and upgrades. If you paid closer attention to the broadcasts, you may also be aware that the upgrades allow the LHC…

If you’re a fan of science or science fiction, you’re familiar with ‘techno-babble’—the word salad of terms swiped from textbooks and peer-reviewed articles that writers use to make things sound more exciting and futuristic. This kind of scientific glossolalia has become a bit of a pet peeve for me, and today the term irritating me…

Recently, you may have heard something about an elementary particle called the W boson. It probably caught your eye because it had a dire headline like “The Mass of the W Boson May Destroy Physics!” Upon reading it, you probably thought, “Well that’s just perfect; some nerd with a slide rule and a particle accelerator…