Epstein Secrets

drives creativity. There are also some myths to dispel about creative people. Inventors are portrayed as eccentric and hopelessly disorganized, but Feynman kept notes of every idea he ever had. I have kept a series of notebooks, now computer based, since J left university. I still have almost all of thes

n to our classical certainty? What is the state of the cat before I - a sentient observer — open the box? Was the result of the decay measured by the Geiger counter, the cat, or are we waiting for someone to open the box and observe the result? The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics — named a

to reach for a gun every time he hears mention of it. The thought experiment works like this. A cat is put in a box with a radioactive substance, a Geiger counter and a vial of poison. If the counter detects a radioactive decay it breaks the bottle and the cat dies, if no decay is detected the cat lives

seems to offer hope of a world where any dream, no matter how outlandish, is realizable. Other familiar names, Bohr, Schrodinger, Dirac, and later Feynman and Dyson, each made great leaps into the unknown. But they weren't alone. Physics is a collaborative discipline. Too often science stories are wr

But even closer to home, relativistic time dilation has an impact. We on Earth are all bombarded every day by cosmic rays from space. If you had a Geiger counter and stood out in a field, the counter would click at a regular rate every few seconds, as it recorded the impact of high-energy particles c

rative for antimatter came through the work of one of the most important physi- cists of the latter half of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman. Feynman could not have been more different from Dirac. While 97 2P_Glealer-StoryEverrold_Atindd 97 12/1006 3:06 PM EFTA00286019 98 THE GREATEST STORY

en- tored him throughout the rest of his career. Bothe was spectacularly lucky to be mentored by Planck and, shortly thereafter, by Hans Geiger, of Geiger counter fame. Geiger, in my mind, is one of the most talented experimental physicists to have been over- looked for a Nobel Prize. Geiger had begun