Epstein Secrets

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.

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

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

, 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

tion. Still, questions remained, especially given the apparent disagree- ment with the Seattle/Oxford results. At a talk at Caltech on the subject, Richard Feynman, characteristically, homed in on a key outstanding ex- perimental question and asked whether the SLAC experimentalists had checked that the detector

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