"The idea was there in 1977: to re-use a 27-km circular tunnel on the Franco–Swiss border, built for a high-energy electron–positron collider, to house an even more powerful proton machine — the Large Hadron Collider. … Now the LHC is about to come to life…"

"Could Galileo have worked out the principles of the modern theory of relativity? Could he, even in the mid-seventeenth century, have derived the Lorentz transformations, the existence of a fundamental limiting velocity, and the equivalence of mass and energy? ..."

"Long story short. I made my gravity wave detector from a bathtub full of green gelatin. I scavenged a couple of gyroscopic motion sensors from cameras, sank them into the gelatin, and wired them to a video display so I can see the gelatin jiggles as weird screens. Late at night, when the chickens are asleep and the traffic on the highway dies down, I see messages. ..."

Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin, by Lawrence Weinstein and John A. Adam: "There is an art to this type of order-of-magnitude estimation, but it is not usually taught to students in any systematic way. In fact, most physics textbooks concentrate on exactly solvable problems and then, well, solve them exactly. Guesstimation steps into this breach and presents an entertaining collection of some 60 estimation problems, complete with an introductory bluffers' guide on how to master them…"