Gentlefolk,

While I may be pilloried for what I am about to say, I shall say it anyway.

Many years ago at Caltech, Richard Feynman, speaking about quantum theory, opened a lecture with “Do not take the lecture too seriously . . . just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get...into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."

It is prudent to take his warning seriously. If you try to picture the quantum world in familiar ways you will come hopelessly unstuck. The quantum world really is different, and the only way to come to grips with it is to suspend disbelief.

The reports of the last week; that neutrinos have mass, and that the event horizon of a black hole is permeable, provide us with clear evidence that the principle physical theories of nature, both the one that describes the infinitesimal, and the one that describes the infinitely large are incomplete, and may be replaced.

This is exciting science.

__________________
Eudaimonia