What about physical understandings of more recent origin? Some readers may have come across excitedly-expressed ideas, involving such names as ‘quarks’ (cf. p. 200), ‘GUT’ (Grand Unified Theories), the ‘inflationary scenario’ (see end-note 13 on p. 449), ‘supersymmetry’, ‘(super) string theory’, etc. How do such new schemes compare with those that I have just been referring to? Shall we need to know about them also? I believe that in order to put things in a more appropriate perspective, I should formulate three broad categories of basic physical theory. I label these as follows: 1. SUPERB, 2.
...more
