An ode to physics

摘要

ONE afternoon in 2016, New Scientist consultant Stuart Clark and I barricaded ourselves in a room, armed with flip charts and pens, in a bid to work out what fundamental physics looked like. This turned out to be a confusion of lines and arrows - dotted, looping, scribbled out, realigned - between boxes adorned with "E=mc~2", "uncertainty principle (?)", "quantum field theory" and "cosmic inflation!".The finished product was more coherent. We were proud of it when it appeared in New Scientist - even if we had somehow forgotten about thermodynamics. We could have done with the clear mind of a |im Al-Khalili. Loyalty doesn't allow me to admit he has made a better job of what we attempted, but his new book is really rather good.