Charles Krauthammer extols the speedy-neutrino news from Switzerland and Italy

By Steven T. Corneliussen

Readers who like to see good press for physics research might want to consider the columnist Charles Krauthammer’s reaction to recent European news of measurements showing neutrinos exceeding c.

Krauthammer’s 7 October Washington Post column — which by the way begins with a great physics joke — introduces its physics topic this way:

The world as we know it is on the brink of disintegration, on the verge of dissolution. No, I’m not talking about the collapse of the euro, of international finance, of the Western economies, of the democratic future, of the unipolar moment, of the American dream, of French banks, of Greece as a going concern, of Europe as an idea, of Pax Americana — the sinews of a postwar world that feels today to be unraveling.

I am talking about something far more important. Which is why it made only the back pages of your newspaper, if it made it at all. Scientists at CERN, the European high-energy physics consortium, have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light.

The italics for those last three words are Krauthammer’s. He goes on to summarize the experiment and its results, and at least to mention the possibilities for error. He works hard to get readers to appreciate the implications if the results hold up, writing, “It’s as if someone told you that yesterday at drive time Topeka was released from Earth’s gravity. These things don’t happen. Natural laws don’t just expire between shifts at McDonald’s.” And: “[T]here must be some error. Because otherwise everything changes. We shall need a new physics. A new cosmology. New understandings of past and future, of cause and effect. Then shortly and surely, new theologies.”

Expert observers might find flaws in Krauthammer’s technical explanations. And readers who disapprove of climate-consensus disbelief might hold against him things like a brief video clip excerpted from the 5 February broadcast of PBS’s Inside Washington. There he mocks belief in human-caused climate disruption as a religion whose adherents reject any evidence or counterargument. In Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter for Public Engagement, Matthew C. Nisbet adduces Krauthammer as a conservative commentator who pushes scientific uncertainty to undermine public acceptance of the consensus.

But anyone who likes energetic cheering for physics will want to read this column.

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.