If ever physics had a golden age, a case could be made that it is now. The 17th through 19th centuries saw the great developments in mathematics, instrumentation, and ideas that brought us to the 20th-century revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics. Today, many historical threads are meshing in a wonderfully entangled web of knowledge, discovery, and technology that rivals and may well surpass in beauty any tapestry of other scientific heydays.
In our world, physics is all encompassing. It spans the broad plain between the immeasurably tiny electron and the immensity of the universe. It covers the impossibly hot Big Bang and the impossibly cold Bose–Einstein condensates. It makes time meaningful from yoctoseconds to giga-years. And throughout that scientific realm, at all scales, at all levels of simplicity or complexity, wonders abound.
The intellectually stimulating world of physics today is curiously bimodal. One world is the popular perception of...
