Not just for Phil, although he and I have discovered a lot of common taste in reading material...

I posted this title in the book list thread ER started in Off-Topic; doing so inspired me to begin reading it again:

The Second Creation, by Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann. It is, in essence, a history of the Standard Model, and it is to particle physics what Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos is to extragalactic astronomy: it dwells as much on the scientists as people with distinct personalities as it does on their work. (I have the original 1986 edition... apparently a second edition was published 10 years later).

Chapter 3 begins with an interview with Howard Georgi (who, with Sheldon Glashow, published the first GUT in 1973). When asked about completeness, he answered, in part:

<blockquote We might even guess that we have a complete description of nature down to some shorter scale [i.e., less than 10-36 cm], and that may not be unreasonable as long as (a) we're really just extrapolating what we know; and (b) this description has experimental consequences that can be checked some day. That I regard as a sensible sort of physics. Unfortunately, you can go the other way around and say, "Look, damn it, the geometry of strings in ten dimensions is so elegant that this must be the unique theory of the world!" -- and then try to work your way back to long distances. That seems to me to be rather silly.

[p. 36; the interview dates from 1984]

I read that last night, and immediately thought of this thread, and Phil's long-running scepticism.

Thought you might enjoy it, p