Michelson Morley Award Lecture

The most romantic goal of theoretical physics is to show that the physical world as we observe it embodies a few beautiful, but deeply hidden, secrets. This quasi-mystical vision inspired great thinkers from Pythagoras and Kepler, but went into deep eclipse with the rise of classical physics. Over the twentieth century, it has made an amazing comeback. I will discuss how discoveries in quantum mechanics, and my own work in quantum chromodynamics, enable us to give a precise, accurate account of the structure of matter working almost entirely with ideas -- that is, making almost no reference to measurements. The miracle, then, is that our ``concept world'' agrees with what experimenters measure.