Nobody Wants to Talk to a Physicist

A worker inside the LHC tunnel working on the large magnets that guide particles around the LHC loop. Credit: © CERN

f you found yourself sitting next to a particle physicist on an airplane, would you ask about black holes, alternate universes or perhaps how a plane flies? Michael Tuts, an experimental particle physicist at Columbia University, says he could explain any of these things and more. But when people find out what he does, they don't want to talk. Shame. Tuts flies to Geneva about once every three weeks to work at the CERN lab, where they'll supposedly make one of those miniature black holes that'll destroy Earth. Course, you could ask Tuts if that's really going to happen.