the guy who convinced me to be an it in the first place, bertrand russell.t was obvious, everybody knew it. and then on my next page was about how the babylonians then invented the 360-degree angle. now, how did i know that? because it was in the encyclopedia britannica, it was in bertrand russell's history of philosophy, it was everywhere. so i was about to write that, and then i thought, oh, my god, if eric's going to read this book, i want eric to feel what it's like to be a babylonian b. and to feel what it's like, i have to put the babylonian protractor in your hands and to make your feel viscerally what it's like, i have to find out whether that protractor is made of clay, wood or copper. so for a month i pursued the question of whether a protractor is made of clay -- that is, a babylonian protractor -- is made of clay or p copper or wood. and i couldn't find it. and if somewhere in the back of my mind this happens to you every day, this happens to authors too, you go, you amazing idiot, how could you be so stupid? you are following up this obsession.

what he does is signs the bertrand russell lubber neinstein manifesto to say we have to control these atomic weapons. but even as he's dollying that still 17-year-old, 6-year-old come curious how does that force field work. he asked his assistant to bring nine pages of the patients he was working on in his office and he sat in his deathbed writing equations making mistakes and crossing them out, trying to figure out a unified theory that would help explain the electromagnetism, gravity, the force fields and just to look at them and see the story he would see the last line where it dribbles off and saw as his body he's writing one last line of equations he thought would get him and the rest of us one step closer to the spirit manifest in the law of the universe. as for dr. franklin, that tolerance carries with him a larger thing, being part of something larger. during his lifetime he donated the building front of each and every church built in philadelphia. at one point they were building a new hall and it's still there and called the new hall left of independence hall and he wrote the