Well, that is one way to read it, I suppose. Another is to take the second paragraph as the theme of the piece: if you don't have a grounding in all of this stuff, your reckonings and supposings are probably not as brilliant and revolutionary as you think they are.
The author isn't expressing his disdain for school, but the disdain he perceives in the people who keep e-mailing him with the simple answers to deep questions. "Okay," he says (I'm paraphrasing wildly here), "you may be too cool for school, but if you don't have at least a firm understanding of these basics, you won't even be able to understand why you're wrong when you, quite inevitably, veer off into the muddy mire of misunderstanding."
He is most assuredly not denigrating experimental physics, nor is he saying that the ordinary educational process is a waste of time and effort. (This is not meant to encourage autodidacts in any way.) He's even hinted that the "lies to children" -- those models that seemed to work for a very long time in the pre-GR/pre-quantum world -- aren't nearly as useless as people might think they are, nor are the scientific processes that led to those models.
So, yes, he is being quite sarcastic here, but the sarcasm is pointed in a completely different direction.
The author isn't expressing his disdain for school, but the disdain he perceives in the people who keep e-mailing him with the simple answers to deep questions. "Okay," he says (I'm paraphrasing wildly here), "you may be too cool for school, but if you don't have at least a firm understanding of these basics, you won't even be able to understand why you're wrong when you, quite inevitably, veer off into the muddy mire of misunderstanding."
He is most assuredly not denigrating experimental physics, nor is he saying that the ordinary educational process is a waste of time and effort. (This is not meant to encourage autodidacts in any way.) He's even hinted that the "lies to children" -- those models that seemed to work for a very long time in the pre-GR/pre-quantum world -- aren't nearly as useless as people might think they are, nor are the scientific processes that led to those models.
So, yes, he is being quite sarcastic here, but the sarcasm is pointed in a completely different direction.