When Hawking said, “We may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature,” many particle physicists agreed. But Feynman did not. “I’ve had a lifetime of that,” he said on another occasion. “I’ve had a lifetime of people who believe that the answer is just around the corner.” But again and again it’s been a failure. Eddington who thought that with the theory of electrons and quantum mechanics everything was going to be simple ... Einstein, who thought that he had a unified theory just around the corner but didn’t know anything about nuclei and was unable of course to guess
...more
