Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, Volume 28, no 3-4, 2003 549 Are the Past and the Future Really Out There? JAMES F. WOODWARD Departments of History and Physics, California State University, Fullerton, California 92834, e-mail: jwoodward@fullerton.edu 1 Introduction In the now six decades since Olivier Costa de Beauregard completed his doctoral dissertation with Prince Louis de Broglie the landscape of the field of physics has, in many respects, changed profoundly. High-energy particle physics was then only getting underway. Now we are approaching, indeed have perhaps reached, the limit that society is willing to support in the con- struction of massive accelerator complexes. Then quantum electrodynamics was in the process of being formalized. Now we have the standard model of quantum field theory; and it has been around for a couple of decades. Cos- mology a half-century ago was the preserve of a small band of general rela- tivists, and the fundamental equation of astrophysics was 1 = 10 =100. Now cosmology is practiced by many and is wedded to particle physics; and ob- servations of the cosmic microwave background radiation (predicted, but unappreciated and unobserved, a half-century ago) has recently led to a claim of knowledge of the age of the universe with an error of only one percent. Strides of this sort are found in all areas of physics, indeed science generally. Advances in technology have made possible experiments that 50 and more years ago could only be done as thought experiments, if thought of at all. For all of the strides taken, however, the underlying conundrums of the past bear a striking resemblance to those of today. At mid-century, only Ein- stein and a handful of others devoted their efforts to the creation of a “unified field theory” – a theory at once embracing both gravity and electromagnet- ism. At that time, this effort was widely regarded as a task unlikely to be successful and of dubious merit in any event. This view changed in the late ‘70s; but the focus changed from finding a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism to seeking a quantum theory of gravity that would fit