Epstein Secrets

strates that the discovery that 'nature really follows the simple and elegant rules intuited by the twentieth- and twenty-first- century versions of Plato's philosopher? is one of the most astonishing achievements of the human intellect." —Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics

o endure any- thing, rather than think as they do and live after their manner." So much for those whose lives are lived entirely in illusion, which Plato suggests includes most of humanity. Then, the allegory states that the journey upward—into the light—is the ascent of the soul into the intellectua

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

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

, 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

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

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