“Being a physicist, from all objective points of view, is a miserable career. … The only reason it's worth doing is you just enjoy this. You're obsessed by it. You love what you're doing. And so if you do it as a job, it's going to be very, very disappointing.”

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well, it's not every day you get to talk to a hero of physics, of modern physics, someone whose roots go back quite a ways, someone who's been a leader in the field of astrophysics, of particle physics, who's an educator and a communicator of science, but also who was actually, I think today's guest is my first ever guest who is a professor of mine. Although I took his class as an adjunct student while I was at the University of Wisconsin, and it is one of my personal heroes. This is Francis Halzen: Winner is a Belgian particle physicist, although he's been in America probably more than half his life. He's the Hilldale and Gregory Bright distinguished professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's a director of the Institute for Elementary Particle Physics, and he's the principal investigator of the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory, which is operated at the South Pole, Antarctica, since 2010. Before that, there was Amanda. Francis, it's a certain treat to be here for me to host you here, rather. And I just hope you won't share the grade that I got in your class. Please don't tell my audience. I don't want to.

I don't think my bureaucracy, my administration is so good that I would be able to produce it.

Well, it was one of my favorite classes of all time. Not to mention the fact that back then it was rare that professors wrote the textbook that was used for the class. I think I had that only with Leon Cooper at Brown with one of his quantum mechanics books. But to take this course on particle physics with you, and it was such a treat. And I thought we'd start there, Francis. We always start, we have on, you know, we just had on Martin Rees, Lord Martin Rees last week, and he spoke about his book. And we always do a scenario called judging books by their covers, where we look at the cover of your book and we judge it. And how did you come up with a name and hopefully entice, you know, a tenfold increase in book sales instantaneously. So the book we're talking about is called Quarks and Leptons. It was a wonderful, wonderful book that I had there. Well, we'll show it on the screen. It's written with your co-author, Alan Martin. But I don't recall much about him, but certainly taking it from you was quite a treat. So Francis, can you help us judge quarks and leptons by its cover? How'd you come up with the title, the subtitle, and the cover illustration?