Epstein Secrets

determined by phenomena that lie well beneath the surface of our experience—phenomena that don't rely in any way upon our existence. In this sense, Einstein was wrong: "God" does appear to play dice with the universe, or universes. So far we have been lucky. But like playing at the craps table, our luck

ot implemented. Novel ideas generally stagnate and die without the courage to implement them. I bring this up here because perhaps the true mark of Einstein's ge- nius was not his mathematical prowess (although, contrary to conven- tional wisdom, he was mathematically talented), but his creativity and hi

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 Project. Many years later he was the first director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Il- linois. When Fermilab was being built, in 1

sed at the Institute of Advanced Mathematics in the USA on the Princeton University campus, next door to the Institute for Advanced Study that housed Einstein. Turing travelled to America in 1937 and completed his doctoral thesis at Princeton. He might have stayed, but Europe was heating up and war seemed i

mething complex, you had to employ a computer: a person who could do mental arithmetic enormously fast. Richard Feynman’s first job was computing for the Manhattan Project. The question was: Could a computer, either mechanical or human, blindly follow known rules to decide all mathematical questions? Hilbert’s 10" Probl

is a science historian, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and co- founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, and the author of Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. In his second-best book, the great medieval mathematician al-Khwarizmi described the new place-based

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 romantic heroes—the Feynmans, the Manhattan Project—realized that our career trajectory would at best be working on one project at CERN for fifteen years. That project would either be a failure, in whi

is a science historian, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and co- founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, and the author of Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. In his second-best book, the great medieval mathematician al-Khwarizmi described the new place-based

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 romantic heroes—the Feynmans, the Manhattan Project—realized that our career trajectory would at best be working on one project at CERN for fifteen years. That project would either be a failure, in whi