What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.
I joined the Army and was sent to the MIT radiation laboratory after a few months of introduction to electromagnetic wave theory in a special course, given for Army personnel at the University of Chicago.
There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant'. . . governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions.
String theory is based on the simple idea that all the four forces of the universe: gravity, the electromagnetic force and the two nuclear forces, can be viewed, as music.
It required unusual inquisitiveness to pursue the development of scientific curiosities such as charged pith balls, the voltaic cell, and the electrostatic machine. Without such endeavors and the evolution of associated instrumentation, initially of purely scientific interest, most of the investigations that lead to the basic equations of electromagnetism would have been missed. . . . We would have been deprived of electromagnetic machinery as well as knowledge of electromagnetic waves.
Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. . . Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill. . . At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.
The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
