Are Fundamental Particles Real?
I’d like to end my talk and start getting into discussion with one more thought which dates back about 10 years. This was a discussion I had in Lucerne, Switzerland with a French physicist whose job it was to find elementary particles. And he’d been doing this for most of his life. And we were having dinner, and so I was asking him about his work. And I said isn’t it kind of strange that physicists find a whole set of particles and they all fit together and we get all our textbooks updated, and about 10 or 15 years goes by and then you find another whole set of particles that are smaller, and we get our textbooks all up to date again, and then another 10 or 15 years goes by and you do it all over again? And, you know, he’d thought this all through, because it only took a couple of seconds, and he looked me straight in the eye and he said these particles didn’t always exist. God makes them up as physicists need them. Well, I hope God does the same thing for computer engineers.
