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

this subject? —Martin Rees, author of Just Six Numbers "It is an exhilarating experience to be led through this fascinating story, from Galileo to the Standard Model and the Higgs boson and beyond, with lucid detail and insight, illuminating vividly not only the achieve- ments themselves but also the joy of creat

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

ne wanted to talk about the details in public. 2P_GrealetaleryEverTold_AC.indd 254 12/16116 3:06 PIA EFTA00286176 Spanking the Vacuum 255 That the Standard Model didn't fix in advance many of the details of the Higgs sector didn't dissuade many theorists from proposing models that "predicted" the Higgs mass

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

etical physics. It took several centuries or, if one counts back to the science of the Greeks, several millennia of hits and misses to come up with the Standard Model. So this is where we are. Are great new experimental insights just around the corner that may validate, or invalidate, some of the grander specula