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

(although the idea that light might come in discrete packets had earlier been floated by the great Ludwig Boltzmann in 1877). I have come to admire Planck even more as I have learned about his life. Like Einstein, he was an unpaid lecturer and was not offered an academic position after completing his

risingly, the conventional approaches to this problem were unable to reproduce these observations. After struggling with the problem for six years, Planck presented a revolutionary proposal about radiation that agreed with observations. 2P_Glealer-StoryEverTold_Atirdd 78 12/16116 3:06 PIA EFTA002860

Magueijo, Shahn Majid, Seth Major, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and especially Giovanni Arnelino- Camelia for rel

rdinates are to be understood as coordinate ambiguities rather than physical non-localities. In section 4 this view is supported by an anal- ysis of Einstein's procedure for the synchronization of moving clocks, applied to sc-Minkowksi spacetime. This section closes with some general remarks about the phy

s about how the principle of the relativity of inertial frames can be made consistent with the existence of a minimal length scale, taken to be the Planck length, Ip[1, 2, 3]. It may also be seen as making possible a maximum momenta for an individual particle. Over the almost decade since it was first

el, Joao Magueijo, Seth Major and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein have also been very helpful. I am also grate- ful

icular local event in spacetime appears to be observer dependent. This challenges the basic operational definition of a spacetime event proposed by Einstein, according to which an event is defined by the coincide of several particles in space and time. From the point of view just mentioned, it is not su

(DSR) the action of the Lorentz group on momen- tum eigenstates is deformed to preserve a maximal momentum or minimal length, supposed equal to the Planck length, to, = VO. The classical and quantum dynamics of a particle prop- agating in ti-Minkowski spacetime is discussed in order to examine an appare

quantum craziness of reality was taken by an unlikely explorer, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. In one sense, Dirac was the perfect man for the job. As Einstein is re- puted to have later said of him, "This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful! When I think of Dirac, an old jok

k had helped pioneer the quantum revolution by resolving the paradox of the spectrum of radiation emitted by atomic systems. So it was fitting that Planck should indirectly help resolve the paradoxical makeup of the nucleus. While he didn't himself spearhead the relevant research, he recognized the ta