Epstein Secrets

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

pprenticeship as a bookbinder, Faraday attended the lec- tures of the famous chemist Humphry Davy, then the head of the Royal Institution. Afterward Faraday presented Davy with a three-hundred- page, beautifully bound book containing the notes Faraday had taken during the lectures. Within a year, Faraday

ing for me a copy of a photograph of Mi- chael Faraday taken in 186i. I have treasured it ever since. I don't believe in hero worship, but if I did, Faraday would be up there with the best. Perhaps more than any other scientist of the nine- teenth century, he is responsible for the technology that powers

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

, where this gauge symmetry of nature requires the existence of photons, light, and all the equations and phenomena first discovered by Maxwell and Faraday, then God's appar- ent command "Let there be light" becomes identical with the command "Let electromagnetism have a gauge symmetry." It is less catc

the problem if Veltman had not been obsessed with it, even as most others gave up. The notion that one might ultimately extend the techniques that Feynman and others had developed to tame quantum electrody- namics to try to understand more complex theories such as spontane- ously broken Yang-Mills theor

help explain the symmetry properties of his Eightfold Way. If quarks, which Gell-Mann viewed simply as a nice mathematical accounting tool (just as Faraday had earlier viewed 2P_Glealer-StoryEverTold_Atindd 193 12/16116 3:06 PIA EFTA00286115 194 THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD-SO FAR his proposal of