ABSTRACT
Although nature enfolds the huge and the minute, and both extremes grew from the Big Bang, human reactions to the two could not be more different. Size creates awe, even primal dread. It is the need to find a niche amidst vast echoing spaces that drives us to understand the universe in the large. Nevertheless, von Baeyer believes that it is through these avenues that physicists will eventually come to understand such quantum enigmas as how electrons can behave both as waves and as particles. To illustrate this property, imagine that a beam of electrons encounters a barrier containing two parallel slits. If electrons were simply particles, some would flash through each slit in straight lines, like tiny bullets. The two streams exiting the slits would never meet; and even if they did, they could not cancel each other out. But it is the cutting edge that is most likely to hold the solutions to quantum puzzles.
