He is especially and repetitively savage about what he sees as the extravagant claims made for particle physics, arguing that once the proton, neutron, and electron were found and their properties experimentally confirmed, the very expensive searches for ever more exotic particles, such as the Higgs Boson, were increasingly harder to justify other than by their importance to particle physicists. If we had never discovered the nuclear physicists' exotic particles, life as we know it on this planet would be essentially the same as today. Like a great Bobby Fisher game. Of course, this is a tad unfair, even if some of the claims of its practitioners invite such assaults on their field. Although some particle physicists are contemptuous of questions about why taxpayers should support their costly science, there are others who provide thoughtful analyses of how their research benefits the work of scientists in other fields and contributes to national goals.
Silver has other targets in science.
He attacks what he believes are exaggerated interpretations of the 1953 experiments by Stanley Miller seeking to validate some ideas about how life on Earth may have originated. Using a broader lens, he is more understanding but still impatient with the conservatism of science, its tendency to refuse credence to new ideas until reason overwhelms. He cites the 19th-century resistance to the notion of the equivalence of heat and work and the conservation of energy, even when giants of the day, such as Hermann von Helmholtz, wrote arguments for these ideas. Helmholtz published using his own money. What sweetens this saltiness is how firmly and fairly he can appraise even those who were wrong but gave it an honest try.