As the biggest scientific experiment in history got started on Wednesday morning, Andy McSmith in The Independent wrote: "It was Oscar Wilde who declared that 'all art is useless' - which was not a condemnation, but a proclamation. If you want to create something of beauty, he meant, do not be distracted by people who ask what it is for. On that basis, whatever emerges from the £4.4bn experiment that begins today in the vast complex built at the Cern - The European Organisation for Nuclear Research - laboratory near Geneva, where infinitesimally small particles travelling at mind-boggling speeds will crash together with so much force that they almost replicate the Big Bang, could be called the most expensive work of art in human history. "Mathematicians and physicists have a sense of the aesthetic, as surely as poets and dramatists. In Einstein's theory of relativity or Kepler's laws of planetary motion, they see works of great simplicity and beauty. What they long for now is a simple and beautiful 'theory of everything' that will explain the whole of physics, from the movement of galaxies to the behaviour of subatomic particles, because there is a hole in theoretical physics which causes more distress to the 6,500 scientists working on Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) than the scary speculation about the black hole that some people think will swallow up earth if their experiment goes wrong." Newsweek said: "It's fundamental, rather than practical, knowledge that researchers are after, as well as a suspected new particle called the Higgs boson (dubbed 'The God Particle' for its potential to answer the most basic questions about existence, such as how anything came into existence) that could have unfathomable uses far into the future. Researchers liken the pursuit of the Higgs to the 1897 discovery of the electron, an atom's charged outermost particle. Its detection aided the harnessing of mass electricity, which has fueled core cultural components of the 21st century: the efficient lights we turn on, the TVs we watch and the phones we talk on. Another advance like that, Cern hopes, could be in store." A statement released by Cern said: "Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronised to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision. Today's success puts a tick next to the first of those steps, and over the next few weeks, as the LHC's operators gain experience and confidence with the new machine, the machine's acceleration systems will be brought into play, and the beams will be brought into collision to allow the research programme to begin. "Once colliding beams have been established, there will be a period of measurement and calibration for the LHC's four major experiments, and new results could start to appear in around a year. Experiments at the LHC will allow physicists to complete a journey that started with Newton's description of gravity. Gravity acts on mass, but so far science is unable to explain the mechanism that generates mass. Experiments at the LHC will provide the answer. LHC experiments will also try to probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe - visible matter seems to account for just 5 per cent of what must exist, while about a quarter is believed to be dark matter. They will investigate the reason for nature's preference for matter over antimatter, and they will probe matter as it existed at the very beginning of time." HowStuffWorks provides a layman's guide to how the Large Hadron Collider works, while The Guardian offers an interactive visual guide.
"We can't kill our way to victory"
"The US is 'running out of time' to win the war in Afghanistan, and sending in more troops will not guarantee victory, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm Michael Mullen, warned Congress on Wednesday," CNN reported. "At the same hearing, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the conflict in Iraq has entered the 'endgame,' but said the situation there remains fragile and US decisions in the coming months 'will be critical to regional stability and our national security interests in the years to come.' "Mullen's and Gates' remarks to the House Armed Services Committee came a day after President Bush announced troop reductions in Iraq and the deployment of 4,500 additional troops in Afghanistan." In The Atlantic, the military analysts, Thomas H Johnson and M Chris Mason, wrote: "June was the deadliest month for the US military in Afghanistan since the invasion in October 2001. July became the second straight month in which casualties exceeded those in Iraq, where four times as many US troops are on the ground. More Americans have been killed in Afghanistan since the invasion began than in the first nine years of the Vietnam War, from 1956 to 1964. "As in Vietnam, the US has never lost a tactical engagement in Afghanistan, and this tactical success is still often conflated with strategic progress. Yet the Taliban insurgency grows more intense and gains more popular traction each year. More and more, the American effort in Afghanistan resembles the Vietnam War - with its emphasis on body counts and air strikes, its cross-border sanctuaries, and its daily tactical victories that never affected the slow and eventually decisive erosion of rural support for the counterinsurgency." Reuters reported: "Seven years after the Sept 11 attacks, there is no consensus outside the United States that Islamist militants from al Qa'eda were responsible, according to an international poll published on Wednesday. "The survey of 16,063 people in 17 nations found majorities in only nine countries believe al Qa'eda was behind the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people in 2001." In The Boston Globe, Rita Nakashima Brock and Amir Soltani wrote: "On Sept 12, 2001, America's tragedy elicited sympathy from all over the world, including places as unlikely as Tehran. Thousands of Iranians spontaneously lit candles in solidarity with the families of victims and the American people. The Bush administration squandered the goodwill that poured out to America after that devastating day, when a vast Axis of Friendship emerged from both people and governments that might have helped the United States to create an effective strategy to combat global terrorism, instead of plunging it into two long wars. Instead, President Bush later coined the term 'Axis of Evil' and put Iran on the list for war." In The National Interest, terrorism expert, Bruce Hoffman wrote: "On Sept 11 2001, nineteen terrorists hijacked four airplanes and changed the course of history. In the years since, al Qa'eda has shown itself to be among the world's most formidable and resilient terrorist movements. The full weight of the US-led war on terrorism, declared by President George W Bush following the Sept 11 attacks, has been directed against the movement. Yet, despite its expulsion from Afghanistan - and the loss of its training camps, operational bases and command headquarters in that country - as well as the deaths of thousands of its fighters and the killing or capture of many of its leaders, al Qa'eda has demonstrated a remarkable ability to survive in the face of this concerted onslaught and carry on its violent campaign. Despite the comparatively far more modest amenities and confining nature of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas and surrounding provinces, al Qa'eda has nonetheless been able to reconstitute its global terrorist reach." The Washington Post reported: "Frustrated by repeated dead ends in the search for Osama bin Laden, US and Pakistani officials said they are questioning long-held assumptions about their strategy and are shifting tactics to intensify the use of the unmanned but lethal Predator drone spy plane in the mountains of western Pakistan. "The number of Hellfire missile attacks by Predators in Pakistan has more than tripled, with 11 strikes reported by Pakistani officials this year, compared with three in 2007. The attacks are part of a renewed effort to cripple al Qa'eda's central command that began early last year and has picked up speed as President Bush's term in office winds down, according to US and Pakistani officials involved in the operations. "There has been no confirmed trace of bin Laden since he narrowly escaped from the CIA and the US military after the battle near Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December 2001, according to US, Pakistani and European officials. They said they are now concentrating on a short list of other al Qa'eda leaders who have been sighted more recently, in hopes that their footprints could lead to bin Laden."