Epstein Secrets

Newton was an extraordinary man. He discovered many of the physical principles we use today, and his view of the Universe reigned unchallenged until Einstein’s discovery of relativity. He was also, by many accounts, a nasty piece of work. Not only was he a famous academic, he also head of the Royal Mint. H

k. Who cares why? In 1964, John Bell, an Irish physicist working at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (“CERN’), devised a way to test Einstein’s hidden variable theory. He pointed out that if photons possess hidden variables and we randomly measure them with a detector set at three angles, w

eir head and eye move- ments, but then you are substituting resolution with computer power. At the high end, a team at the US Department of Energy’s Fermilab estimate reality needs one hundred trillion samples per inch for a ‘simple quantum representation. If we look at the many worlds view of quantum mech

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

b 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 1969 Wilson was summoned before Congress to defend the expenditure of significant funds on this exotic new accelerator, which w

hrough Newton's discovery of the laws of motion, through the experimental and theoretical investigations of the nature of electromagnetism, through Einstein's unification of space and time, through the discoveries of the nucleus, quantum mechanics, protons, neutrons, and the discovery of the weak and st

romagnetic wave whose speed could be calculated from first principles, and lo and behold, the prediction was equal to the mea- sured speed of light. Einstein's unification of space and time predicted that clocks would slow for moving observers, and lo and behold, they do, and in just the way he predicted

PS), had just been commissioned as a conventional fixed-target accelerator operating with a proton beam at goo GeV. However, another accelerator at Fermilab, near Chicago, had already achieved proton beams of soo GeV by the time the SPS turned on. In June of that year, physicists Carlo Rubbia, Peter McI