Sawyer uses all the trappings of the hard SF genre without hewing to the ground rule: get your science right! The science in general is ludicrous, but it's particularly inexcusable when the physicists express disappointment that they did not discover the Higgs boson in the first few minutes of running a new accelerator. Virtually all the description of the world of scienctific research rings false, especially the characters' preoccupation with the Nobel prize. All of this wouldn't be so bad if the characters weren't cardboard cutouts. Why read a didactic novel that hasn't been carefully thought out?