…For me physics is a way of seeing – the spectacular and the mundane, the immense and the minute – as a beautiful, thrillingly interwoven whole.

 

That is the way I’ve always tried to make physics come alive for my students; I believed it’s much more important for them to remember the beauty of the discoveries than to focus on the complicated math – after all, most of them aren’t going to become physicists. I have done my utmost to help them see the world in a different way; to ask questions they’ve never thought to ask before; to allow them to see the haloes around the sun, and to focus on its exquisite beauty of physics, rather than on the minutia of the mathematics. That is also the intention of this book, to help open your eyes to the remarkable ways in which physics illuminates the workings of our world, and its astonishing elegance and beauty.

My appreciation of the crucial role of measurements in physics is one reason I am skeptical of theories that cannot be verified by means of measurements. Take string theory, or its souped-up cousin, superstring theory, the latest effort of theoreticians to come up with a “theory of everything”. Theoretical physicists, and there are some brilliant ones doing string theory, have yet to come up with a single experiment, a single prediction, that could test any of string theory’s propositions. Nothing in string theory can be experimentally verified – at least so far. This means that string theory has no predictive power, which is why some physicists, such as Sheldon Glashow at Harvard, question whether it’s really physics at all.