And finally….just how much fun was it to write the book It was tremendous fun – the most fun I’ve had in my career as an academic. It was fun for a number of reasons, the first of which being that the ideas themselves are juicy. They are the deep, deep questions of modern physics that are endlessly fascinating to keep beating one’s head against. The detective story aspect to it was also a lot of fun. The events I was focusing on were happening 40 years ago rather than 300 years ago, and these folks are still alive. They were very generous with their time and while I could interview them in formal ways, I could also follow up in thousands of emails focused on tiny details. And don’t forget, they were operating in a preemail world, so they wrote everything down, creating a paper trail of tens of thousands of documents that if you know where to look, you can begin to unearth. The process of connecting those dots by bouncing back and forth between yellowing pages in an archive and actually talking to the people involved
– who are just as passionate about physics today as they were back then – was deeply gratifying. It was great, great fun.
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Top - David Kaiser - photo by Leo Rubenstein