As it turns out, however, at the heart of Smolin's proposed solutions to what he calls the "crisis of physics" is a philosophical view that should, in principle, be easier to grasp.
(He later came to be called the "conscience of physics" for his critical insights).
Indeed, the last song on Mr. Morsberger's 1999 album "Waiting for Wood" is an ode to universal theory called "The End of Physics," and subsequent songs have addressed the Theory of Relativity, Darwinism and sound waves.
In 1975, a young Austrian physicist by the name of Fritjof Capra published a bestselling book called The Tao of Physics that still can be found on the science shelves of most bookstores.
It's possible, though, to compute in a much more intimate and natural way — by programming the individual atoms themselves to solve problems using what Deutsch calls "the true laws of physics".
The algorithms used by movie rental site Netflix are now responsible for 60% of rentals from the site, as we rely less and less on our own critical faculties and word of mouth and more on what Mr Slavin calls the "physics of culture".
For example, there's a law of physics, called gravity, that says you cannot walk on the ceiling.
A nifty bit of physics called the piezoelectric effect, by which certain materials generate an electric current when stressed, offers a way around that.
And no one at the university knew much about his scientific passion, a highly abstract and mathematical area of physics called string theory.
A particle like the one that may have been found could also be part of an entire family of still-undiscovered particles predicted by an advanced theory of physics called supersymmetry.
