I dutifully read most of the three-page article on the new physics in today’s issue of The Economist, but I am none the wiser for it. Among the eighteen elementary particles in the so-called standard model I can still recognize the electron and the photon, but all the others are new to me. The six quarks—up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom—have wonderful names, but that is all I can say about them. If the standard model is indeed needed to understand how the universe works, it appears I will never understand it, and not for the lack of trying. However, the fact that the standard model is next to incomprehensible to anyone but a few theoretical physicists is liberating in a way. Three cheers for poetry!