Epstein Secrets

but the spin will not be flipped. Thus, in the mirror a left-handed particle will turn into a right-handed particle. (And so, if the poor souls in Plato's cave had had mirrors, they might have felt less strange about the shadows of arrows flipping direction.) This working picture of left-handed par

lating the weak interac- tion to electromagnetism that he encouraged one of his dozen graduate students at Harvard at the time to explore the issue. Sheldon Glashow graduated in 1958 with a thesis on the subject and continued to explore the issue for the next few years as a National Science Foundation post- doc

erform within the superconductor, as long as it remained su- perconducting, would reveal that photons are massless in the outside world. If you were Plato's philosopher inside such a superconductor, you would have to intuit an incredible amount about the outside world be- fore you could infer that a my

and was invited (in 1966) to speak at several locations in the USA, where he was spending a sabbati- cal year. After Higgs's talk at Harvard, where Sheldon Glashow was now a professor, Glashow apparently complimented him on having invented a "nice model" and moved on. Such was the fixation on the strong in- te

t is really there." I did so because the story I have told is the most profound ex- ample of this wise observation that I know of. I next described Plato's Allegory of the Cave because I know of no better or more lyrical representation of the actual history of science. The triumph of human existence

after I finished the first version of this book. I received com- ments and useful suggestions and corrections in response, and I want to thank both Sheldon Glashow and Wally Gilbert for their suggestions, as well as Richard Dawkins, and I am particularly indebted to one of the colleagues I admire most for his