David M Goldberg

But under no circumstances should you call it “the God particle.”
This morning, to the nearly universal expectations of the physics community, the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs for the theoretical prediction of what has come to be known as the Higgs boson. Nobel Prizes (at least in the sciences) are almost always given out for a discovery rather than a prediction, so it wasn’t until last year, when two independent groups at the Large Hadron Collider detected the eponymous particle, that Englert and Higgs were even in contention. This year’s announcement represents an incredibly quick turnaround for a committee that has generally been fairly conservative in its awards. Einstein had to wait 16 years for his. [1st paragraph]

A physicist looks at The Time Traveler’s Wife.
You might say we’re living in a golden age of time travel. From television shows like Heroes, Lost, and Flash Forward to this summer’s Star Trek movie, punctures in the space/time continuum are turning up all around us. As a physicist—and, perhaps redundantly, a science-fiction geek—I’m particularly sensitive to the pleasures of these mind-bending narratives. I’m also sensitive to their flaws. Most fictional accounts of time travel are rife with paradoxes, parallel universes, and plot holes that violate strict physical laws: Instead of exploring the limits of our understanding, they make a mockery of them. [1st paragraph]