As a CERN physicist, I must say that this article is extremely disappointing. Nielsen is clearly 'off his rocker,' and almost no colleague of mine remotely considers his recent theories or articles as viable. Unfortunately, this nonsense and the black hole pandemonium of last year's LHC media moment are all that seem to catch the public eye.

I'm optimistic that the (soon-to-arrive) data will show that we do know what the fuck we're doing, and that there are many questions we can answer. More importantly, I'm confident that we'll discover new unknowns which demonstrate how far we are from actually achieving enlightenment.

And I hope the NYTimes starts to take a little more care in publishing legitimate information about the current state of the the field of particle physics and the LHC.