The last century was essentially the century of physics. We went from thinking the sun shone because it was burning, to a deeper understanding of things nuclear like atoms, electrons, neutrons, mysterons and how to make our very own big bangs with a bit of fission or fusion by smashing or mashing them together. We’ve pretty much done nothing more than polish the logically inferential spinoffs of that understanding for the last century. Apart from a couple of bright flashes courtesy of the Enola Gay and the Strawberry Bitch, it’s all been good stuff, but you’d hardly call it breaking new ground.

We’ve just been quarking around for the last half century or so, with Feynman’s whimsical idea of fractionally charged particles as a piss take, because I think he intuited we were just doing the reductio ad absurdum foxtrot. He’d done his bit and decided it was time to bugger off and learn to…