Robert P. Crease is professor and chairman in the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory and a columnist for Physics World. He is the author of The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science (Random House, 2003) and recently completed a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that was begun by the late Abraham Pais: J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2006).