I've had it. Totally, completely had it. Everywhere I look, it's gossip, gossip, gossip. It's like every scientist I know is ignoring his work on submolecular acceleration to keep up with the rumor mill.

I mean, first, Dimitar Sasselov, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, breathlessly emailed news that NASA's Kepler satellite discovered 140 earthlike planets in a small patch of sky in the constellation Cygnus.

Naturally all my friends with PhDs are like, "No way." "Way!" "No way." "Way!" I mean, we're talking a Russian named Dimitar here, not some dude from California named Steve. Imagine my surprise when, like a week later, Dimi's eating his words. "Well, maybe I meant 'earth-sized' instead of 'earthlike,'" he said.

Oh. No prob. No diff. Well, except for the life-supporting atmosphere. D'oh!

Then, three weeks ago we heard news that'd literally change the world. Researchers at Fermilab had discovered the Higgs boson, came the word from everybody and his lab assistant.

Naturally we broke out the champagne. This was the "God" particle, that legendary mystical nanospeck that imbues other particles wth mass. Even before the Moët goes flat, though, the Fermilab physicists report that, well, maybe they didn't find it at all.

Yeah. Right. "Physicists." Maybe it was a natural mistake. And maybe somebody should imbue their heads with mass.

In by far the worst case, though, last December physicists everywhere went berserk over news that an experiment at the bottom of a Minnesota iron mine had detected vast quantities of dark matter. With trembling hands we tuned into the webcast when the team introduced their findings at Stanford and Fermilab. The New York Times held its front page. And you know what the truth was? They found exactly two dark matter particles. You know, like one more than you'd find in a petri dish full of staphylococcus aureus.

My head spun so fast it made my centrifuge envious. Is that crazy? It's like telling your class you're going to explain Guberman's Rules of 11-Dimensional Symmetry but then showing them slides of, like, bosons.

Call me alarmist, but I see this as a horrible trend, to the fourth degree sigma plus or minus two. Rather than decades of research accompanied by peer review in prestigious journals, now it's all hype, hype, hype followed by studies that couldn't prove Fermat's Theorem for Cheese. Does this mean the end of science? Well, its half-life has certainly expired.

My wife caught me teary-eyed at my bunsen burner last night. Finally I broke down and admitted my misgivings. "Maybe there's a reason Scientific American isn't sold at supermarkets next to OK!" I said. I mean, if you can't believe a scientist, who can you believe? I just thank the elusive God particle that these dudes are working on science rather than the important stuff, like figuring out if Tom Cruise is gay.