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Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist
My life among the elementary particles has made me question whether reality exists at all.
As I read the chapters, I learned about discoveries by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek of the world of microscopic life, by Marie Curie about radioactivity, by Albert Einstein about relativity, and I thought, “My God, I could do this, too!” By the time I was 8, I was convinced that everything could be explained, and that I, personally, was going to do it. Perhaps we can use my sketch to visualize the situation—we are able to tell stories about the corners of this diagram of possible worlds, where simplifications and approximations suffice, but the categories and concepts that we have been capable of, at least to date, fail to describe the interior where reality is actually located. Vijay Balasubramanian is a theoretical physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, a visiting professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute.
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