The Man?

Is Dennis Overbye The Man in science reporting? He's got the bully pulpit at the NYT, a graceful writing style, and is plugged in to the world's top physicists. Still, I was a bit put off by the tone in his recent NYT article Physics Awaits New Options as Standard Model Idles

For most of us, any physics is new physics.

Having stopped paying attention somewhere back around "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" or the discovery that you can make sparks by shuffling your feet on the carpet and then touching a doorknob (or another person), we amateurs respond with the same glazed mixture of wonder and incredulity to the latest abilities of computer chips or the expansion of the universe.

Isn't that a bit too condescending an attitude to take to readers of the NYT science section?

The main theme of his article, the theoretical malaise induced by the fact that particle physics hasn't revealed any applecart upsetting discoveries lately, is rather well done. The melodramatic ending is over the top though:
In words that still haunt me, Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, once wrote, "When a child asks, What is the world, we literally have nothing to tell her."

[string theory deletia]...

My own daughter, Mira, just turned 4 and she is not asking me what the world is made of, quite yet. I've managed to keep ahead of her so far, if only by reading a page ahead in the dinosaur books that occupy bedtime, but the time is coming when she will be calling me and the world's physicists to account.

When she does, I would like to have something to tell her, and myself.

Jeez, Dennis, that's ridiculous. We have better anwers now than ever before. If you want final answers, you need to go to the theology section, not physics.

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