LAUSR

I begin with a warning: theoretical physics is an edifice built over the centuries by some of mankind's greatest minds, using ever more complicated and sophisticated concepts and mathematics to cover phenomena on scales billions of times removed—in directions both bigger and smaller—from our human dimensions, where our simple intuition or primitive language cannot pretend to have any validity. So any popular discussion is necessarily impressionistic, being couched in terms of classical analogies that do not really apply. This warning label should be attached to all such accounts, the present one included. However, I have tried to focus here on an aspect that involves more human attributes of our subject.