Once more, he said he would speak as an old man to the young scientists and urge them to break away from the pack. At CERN, as at all the laboratories of high-energy physics, the pack was growing rapidly. Every experiment required enormous teams. Author lists for articles in the Physical Review were beginning to take up a comically large portion of the page. “It will not do you any harm whatever to think in an original fashion,” Feynman said. He offered a probabilistic argument. The odds that your theory will be in fact right, and that the general thing that everybody’s working on will be
...more
