"When I was in high school, Light My Fire was on the radio and the selectric typewriter was at the cutting edge of technology. In our physics books, which did go up as far as E = mc2, the smallest particles were protons, neutrons and electrons, and the Big Bang was a fantasy, not a theory. The ensuing decades have added new vocabularyâquarks, charm, superstringsâand new concepts, too. But I donât know what they are. Is it important to know? ..."