ON THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE INTERNET: WHY DO WE CALL IT WORLD WIDE WEB?

The dashing engineer and synesthete Sir Robert Cailliau has had to go through a secure keypad door or two in his time.

He’s one of the world’s premier scientists, a developer of the world wide web, and a long-time employee at CERN, where a supercollider will one day answer questions about not only the origin of our universe but life in the present day. The Belgian-born man knighted by his homeland was faced with one of those guarded passageways shortly before speaking to me for my book, Tasting the Universe, where this interview first appeared.

“A few weeks ago I had to go in and out of a building complex protected by a code that visitors had to type on a keypad at the entrance,” he told me. “I had memorized the code and things were fine. Then I had to go back there after a number of days, and I could not quite remember it,” he recalls.

Then the tiny particles that traverse the tunnel pathways of his own brain at high speeds got to work. His synesthesia kicked in.

“But closing my eyes and thinking of it, I saw the color pattern and was thus able to fill in the digits I had forgotten.”

Sir Robert, a Ph.D. who worked with Sir Tim Berners-Lee of Great Britain on creating the world wide web, (initially to create…