David Barnett writes in today’s Guardian:
I wouldn’t like to go as far as branding the presumably highly qualified and very professional team of physicists gathering on the Swiss-French border today “mad,” but the question must be asked whether the boffins assembling to throw the switch on the Large Hadron Collider have ever read a work of fiction in their collective lives.
If they had spent less time reading Michael Nelkon’s Advanced Level Physics as spotty teenagers and devoted more attention to comic books and spy novels, they might be feeling as much trepidation as the rest of us at their experiments to recreate the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe.
It’s pretty rare to see someone complain that scientists don’t read enough science fiction.
(Barnett is a journalist and the author of several of novels; his website says he’s a client of our friend John Jarrold.)
