Dennis Overbye retires – excited about it?

News by Kip Hansen — December 21, 2024

I often make fun of, ridicule and criticize science reporting new york times. It's been a while, maybe more than a decade, since I've been covering straightforward, unbiased, and accessible explanatory science, medicine, and environmental news for The New York Times' science desk. Gone are the days when Andy Revkin and a few others (please remind me their names in the comments) tried to write rationally about the scientific and medical controversies of the turn of the century.

But there are always a science journalist Regardless, many of his themes are the fantastically distant speculations of my generation of physicists, astronomers, and philosophers of science, who may or may not have been ingesting too many hallucinogens during their college years in the late 1960s.

That would be:

Dennis Overby

On his By Row page, there is a seemingly endless list of news outputs. he wrote there in the field space and astronomy section of The Times.

Overbye gave his “eulogy” in an article titled “Eulogy After Retirement”: The solstice of the soul. Recommended reading for all people in science and astronomy.

In it he made the following important points about science:

“After 50 years and $10 billion, physicists have finally discovered the Higgs boson, or 'God particle.' It's physicists' best yet, but still unsatisfactory discovery. The missing key to a theory of nature known as the Standard Model.

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“Astronomers have discovered that Billions Potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way.

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“At the same time, they have to admit that 95% of the universe is made up of invisible ‘dark matter’, which holds the stars in galaxies together, while ‘dark energy’ pushes these galaxies apart at a faster speed. No one knows what these dark things are.

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“I grew up in the Sputnik era, when science and space exploration suddenly became a national priority for the United States. … Scientists were potential saviors and heroes; anything was possible. Later, giant particle accelerators were built to explore the mysteries of inner space. .The Berlin Wall came down. Innovations kept coming: transistors, the Internet, CT scans and MRIs, GPS, the Nobel Prize.

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“The political response to COVID-19 has cast doubt on the concept of public health; the political response to climate change has cast doubt on the concept of scientific expertise.

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“Artificial intelligence has become frighteningly smart. Silicon Valley has thrust us into new realms of loneliness, squinting at small screens for fragile cues of community.

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“Yet science, based on doubt rather than certainty, is arguably the most successful human endeavor of all time. Its truths are provisional; progress, as the saying goes, occurs only at the funerals of philosophers and cosmologists.

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“We don’t know why there is something rather than nothing. Or, as Einstein said when he was thinking about the randomness implicit in quantum mechanics, the inner rules of the subatomic realm, why God rolls the dice.

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Physicist John Archibald Wheeler, a pioneer in the study of black holes, liked to say, “When we realize how strange the universe is, we first understand how simple it is.” …

“Going forward,” Overbye said, “my money is on chaos.

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Goodbye, Dennis. However, I am sure you will continue to new york timesdespite officially retiring. I sure hope so…

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Author comments:

Love him or hate him, he set the bar for his fellow journalists, sometimes too high. era. Personally, I will miss his column.

Don't worry, he won't give up writing. Here are several authors who will attest to the fact that once it gets into your blood, you can't stop, even if you are determined to do so. I am a successful quitter: I quit drugs, I quit drinking, I even quit smoking! I’ve tried to stop writing more than once, but it didn’t do me any good—I slowed down my writing but couldn’t give up.

By the way, we need more good writers here… Better journalism Plain language explains the basics of the science affecting climate, debunks media propaganda, and debunks the endlessly repeated climate crisis talking points (all of which are wrong ), and simple fun things about science and nature. To get involved, use the Submit a Story link.

Thank you for reading.

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