I can remember, when I was maybe 6 or 7, lying on the grass and staring up at the sun. We’d just had a lesson at school about Pi, the number embedded in circles. And I thought, Is Pi real? What does it mean that there is this sort of mystical number at the heart of the sun or in a hubcap or any circular thing that you see? And the more you study physics, the more astounding are the examples of that—that math is everywhere in the world. How do we interpret that? What is the meaning of the fact that there are these incredibly complex equations that describe phenomena like lasers?
