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"Think of what basic physics has done for technology, wealth and health," he says. "Physicists figured out how atoms interact, and it led to the whole wireless industry." Twentieth-century physics has brought us transistors, semiconductors, lasers and circuits, and much more. It has brought us computing, the Internet, and MRIs. He has no idea what breakthroughs will come next. What he does know is that every time there's a fundamental breakthrough in our exploration of reality, "we have an industrial revolution in 50 years."

Such revolutions mean we can't predict the future. We'll always get it wrong. "Think of New York in 1900," he says. "It had thousands of horses. The streets were full of mud and it had a terrible pollution problem." If you'd asked New Yorkers to predict the future, they would have described ever-growing mountains of horse manure. To improve long-haul transportation, they would have asked for more steam locomotives and railway engineers. No one could have foreseen the transformation wrought in just a few short years by Henry Ford and the internal combustion engine - just as no one could have forecast that in 2008 we'd all be typing with our thumbs.