Another Frank Wilczek quote, after his June 12 lecture at UC Irvine:
I have never used the phrase “theory of everything”– except to reproach some of my colleagues for using the phrase.
I like a theory that is a theory of this, or a theory of that.
And, speaking of the University of California at Irvine, a hotspot of physics and the location of this year’s international conference on supersymmetry, I was fascinated by local legends of its founding.
The story goes that Mr. Irvine owned an enormous spread of land in between Los Angeles and San Diego, where he farmed and ranched and worried about the future business potential of farming and ranching. His ecomonic worries ended when the University of California built a university on some of the land from his ranch, making the rest of it worth millions more dollars.
And they decided to build a university here because land to build it on was a free gift from Mr. Irvine.