Epstein Secrets

d roboticist, I don’t call myself one”). He began as a physicist. “I turned out to be a bad physicist,” he told me recently. “T struggled on, went to Los Alamos, and thought, ‘Well maybe I’m not going to be a Nobel Prize winner, but I can still be a scientist.’ All of us who were in Physics and had these roma

hine and founded what may have been the first Al company—Thinking Machines Corporation—to produce and market it. This was despite a lunch he had with Richard Feynman, at which the celebrated physicist remarked, “That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” Maybe “despite” is the wrong word, since Feynman had

d roboticist, I don’t call myself one”). He began as a physicist. “I turned out to be a bad physicist,” he told me recently. “T struggled on, went to Los Alamos, and thought, ‘Well maybe I’m not going to be a Nobel Prize winner, but I can still be a scientist.’ All of us who were in Physics and had these roma

hine and founded what may have been the first Al company—Thinking Machines Corporation—to produce and market it. This was despite a lunch he had with Richard Feynman, at which the celebrated physicist remarked, “That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” Maybe “despite” is the wrong word, since Feynman had

ut be reminded of another more recent great experi- mental physicist, Robert R. Wilson—who, at age twenty-nine, was head of the Research Division at Los Alamos, which developed the atomic 2P_Glealer-StoryEverTold_Atirdd 30 12/16116 3:06 PIA EFTA00285952 Seeing in the Dark 31 bomb during the Manhattan

small scales, nature behaves in a way that human intuition cannot ever fully embrace, because we cannot directly experience the behavior itself. As Richard Feynman once argued, no one understands quantum mechanics—if by under- stand one means developing a concrete physical picture that appears fully intuitive.

worked out the steps in between afterward. Bethe's solid technical prowess and Feynman's brilliant insights combined well when they both worked at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb. They would go down the hallway with Feynman loudly countering the patient but persistent Bethe, and their colleagues labeled th

e most important in modern particle physics, is, not surprisingly, called the Dirac equation. (Some years later, when Dirac first met the physicist Richard Feynman, whom we shall come to shortly, Dirac said after another awkward silence, "I have an equation. Do you?") Dirac's equation was beautiful, and as th