The Dish covered the particle yesterday. A reader responds:

Your quote about Robert Wright's perplexity - " I think the physicists who 'understand' what it is can do so only because they don't have the layperson's compulsion to think about the world in ways that are ultimately metaphorical" - reminded me of a few paragraphs that James Gleick wrote in his biography of Isaac Newton.  Newton's laws  were once the bleeding edge of research, understandable by only a few.  Nowadays, they're utterly intuitive: