Dennis Overbye on Retiring from The New York Times: A Solstice of the Soul

As the day shrinks into its annual darkness, right here’s what I do know in regards to the cosmos — to date.

For an immediate of cosmic time you’re the heart of the universe, questioning the place all people goes and why, as trillions of galaxies, smudges of sunshine and risk, recede. You belief that the regular rise and fall of stars heralds order, solely to be ambushed without warning and confusion.

For the final quarter-century, I’ve been privileged to trip on a vertiginous wave of awe and terror. Armed with the good enterprise card in journalism, figuring out me because the “cosmic affairs correspondent” of The New York Times, I descended into the bowels of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, froze on stormy mountaintops in Mexico and drank in glittery star fields on peaks in Chile and Hawaii. I lectured about Albert Einstein in Hong Kong and Berlin and despaired as I wandered the muddy rubble of the World Trade Center after Sept. 11.

Now, I’m retiring from The Times and should relinquish that enterprise card, though not the mission behind it. I’ll proceed to seem in these pages now and again and work on a e book making an attempt to marry the private and the cosmic.

This gig supplied me with an exciting vista of historical past and science. Researchers and the remainder of us heard black holes colliding, spreading ripples by the material of space-time, and noticed them staring like smoke rings from the hearts of galaxies — entice doorways into the top of time. After 50 years and $10 billion, physicists lastly found the Higgs boson (or “God particle”). It was the lacking key to physicists’ greatest, however nonetheless unsatisfying, principle of nature but, referred to as the Standard Model.

Astronomers found that there are billions of presumably liveable planets within the galaxy. At the identical time, they’ve needed to settle for that 95 p.c of the cosmos consists of invisible “darkish matter” that binds stars in galaxies and a “darkish vitality” that pushes those self same galaxies aside ever sooner. Nobody is aware of what this darkish stuff is.

In 2015, after I first heard rumors that the dual antennas of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory had felt the cosmos quaking from the collision of two black holes deep in area and time, I didn’t imagine it. What I knew about LIGO had satisfied me that it was an outlandishly formidable experiment certain to fail.