A Vast Yet Simple Ocean

The simple Google home page is the entryway
to the most complicated software on the planet.

As school children in the 60's we knew the most famous equation in history,

E = mc²

not that any of us had more than a superficial understanding of what it meant.

Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek marvels at the simplicity of E = mc² and other fundamental concepts of physics:

“The Principle of Relativity” brings together 11 seminal physics papers—including Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, Hermann Minkowski’s introduction of space-time and Hermann Weyl’s concept of “gauge invariance”—which set the course of 20th-century physics. Yet all this and more fits comfortably in a book of 217 small pages, despite generous font sizes and margins.

It took the best minds in human history over thousands of years to develop our current understanding of the universe; the fact that the fundaments of this knowledge could be condensed into a small volume gives hope.

(Professor Wilczek is amused by the weight of the "hefty" book Data Compression, as am I by my doorstopper-grade texts in accounting, finance, and income taxation. Answers that used to be deducible from basic principles now have many exceptions. Accounting needs an Einstein!)