My amiable friend Professor Mozart dropped by the other day. Now that his NSF grant has been cut way back, he has more time to think about things, and it's a pleasure to chat with him. Some of his views, though, are more than a little peculiar, as the following conversation clearly reveals.

“I have to admit,” Mozart began sadly, “that particle physics over the last 40 or 50 years has been a disappointment. Who would have expected that in half a century we wouldn't learn anything really profound?”

“Nothing profound?!” I exploded. “What about parity nonconservation? What about the breakdown of time-reversal symmetry?”

“To be sure,” sighed Mozart, “we've learned that left can be distinguished from right and that time past is different from time future. But most ordinary people knew the difference between left and right all along, and who except the most highly trained physicists—temporarily, it now turns out—ever doubted for a moment that they could tell the future from the past? So establishing that the asymmetry is really there after all is certainly commendable. But about really serious problems we've discovered nothing—nothing whatsoever about the central puzzle.”

“And just what might that puzzle be?” I urged, for he seemed in danger of succumbing to an attack of melancholia.

He revived. “All particle physics has taught us about the central mystery is that quantum mechanics still works. Perfectly, as far as anybody can tell. What a letdown!”

“Letdown? It's a triumph!”

“Letdown!” he insisted. “Think of the previous half-century, when we went down from the macroscopic by seven or eight orders of magnitude. What delicious confusion! All the verities of the preceding two centuries, held by physicists and ordinary people alike, simply fell apart—collapsed. We had to start all over again, and we came up with something that worked just beautifully but was so strange that nobody had any idea what it meant except Bohr, and practically nobody could understand him. So naturally we kept probing further, getting to smaller and smaller length scales, waiting for the next revolution to shed some light on the meaning of the old one. But what happened? For 65 years, since 1925, we've been probing, at finer and finer levels.