solar system size and distribution variations, 164
“Song of Myself” (Whitman), 15
space
density/mass of, 197–99, 240–41
fields as space-filling media, 95, 96–97, 99
geometry of, 38, 151, 156–57, 240–41
as a material, 39, 90
motion of, 39–40
See also space-time; spatial abundance
space-time, 77, 125
curvature of, 57, 116–17, 178–79, 197–98, 240–41
detecting distortions in, 57–58, 180–82
and distance measurements, 20
and gravity, 116–17
as matter, 40, 57, 178
spatial abundance, xiv, 13–40
cosmic horizon, 28–31
inner plenty, 14, 15, 31–37
outer plenty, 13–14, 15–31
surveying the cosmos, 21–28
See also distances; size and scale
special relativity, 17, 20, 113–14, 232
spectra and spectroscopy, 106–9
speed
of human thought, 52–54, 59
See also acceleration; time; velocity
spiders, 170
spin, 73, 74–76, 80, 139
of specific particle types, 75, 78, 85, 86, 235, 237
stability
provisional, 131, 132–34
See also instability/disequilibrium
standard candles, 25–26
Standard Model. See Core concept
Stapledon, Olaf, 43, 44, 222
star clusters, 26, 51
Starmaker (Stapledon), 43
stars, 22
and the cosmic distance ladder, 24–27
as energy source, 165–66
neutron star mergers, 180, 182
powering of, 113, 135–36, 163, 165, 166, 235
stellar evolution and dating, 47, 51–52, 154, 162
visible, number of, 14
and the weak force, 104
See also Sun
Steinhardt, Paul, 157
Störmer, Horst, 89
strong force, 84, 103, 110, 118, 234
See also QCD
subatomic structures and interactions, 35–37, 39–40, 56, 79
See also elementary particles; specific particle types
Sun
age of, 52
Earth’s distance from, 24
evolution and future of, 51, 163, 165
surface temperature of, and molecular processes, 133–34
See also solar energy
supercomputers, 120, 176, 204, 220, 221
superconductivity, 88
Super Mario, 70–71
supernovas, 198–99
superstring theory, 122
Swift, Jonathan, 60
symmetry, 75
time-reversal symmetry and T violation, 148–49, 188–92, 203
synchrony, 45–46
tauons, 237
telescopes, 21, 158
temperature
and climate change, 140–41
and molecular processes, 133–34
See also thermal equilibrium
Tennyson, Alfred, 37–38
Theory of Everything, 216
thermal equilibrium, 151, 163
Thomson, J. J., 79–80
Thorne, Kip, 180
thought
speed of, 52–54, 59
See also human cognition
time, 41–60
abundance of, xiv, 43–44
cosmic time, 30, 37, 43, 47
definitions and manifestations of, 44–47, 159
and distance measurement, 20, 30
future of time manipulation, 57–60
measuring, 45, 47–52, 55–57
natural cycles and repetition, 44–46
radioactive dating, 47–51, 154
speed of human thought, 52–54, 59
stellar evolution and dating, 47, 51–52, 154, 162
time reversal, 148–49, 188–92, 203
See also change; clocks; cosmic history; space-time
time crystals, 56, 166
TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), xvii–xviii
tolerance, 207, 218–19
transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), xvii–xviii
transistors, 54, 88, 120
tree-ring dating, 50
Tsui, Dan, 89
T violation and time-reversal symmetry, 148–49, 188–92, 203
ultraviolet radiation, 98, 171
uncertainty principle, 210, 211
unified field theory, 122–24, 166
universality, of basic laws, 21, 38, 63, 65
universe
expansion of, 28–29, 145–46, 148–49, 153–54, 165, 198–99
future evolution of, 165
homogeneity of, 21–22, 38, 150
vs. multiverse, 38–39
size and scale of, 13–14, 37–38
See also astronomy and cosmology; entries beginning with “cosmic”
Uranus, 194
velocity
velocity/position measurement complementarity, 208–13, 214
See also acceleration; speed
Venus, 140
virtual reality, 184
vision
human vision, xiv–xv, xvii, 24, 34–35, 53, 170–71, 205
microscopy techniques, 31–37
parallax, 24, 27
visual art, 217
Vulcan, 194–95
Watson, James, 34
wave functions, 208–9
waves, 28, 32
See also specific wave types
W boson, 174, 234–35
weak charge, 174, 234
weak force, 48, 103–4, 117–19, 173–74, 235
and solar nuclear fusion, 135–36
unified field theory, 122–24, 166
Weinberg, Steven, 201
Weiss, Rainer, 180, 181
Wells, H. G., 151
Weyl, Hermann, 124
Wheeler, John, 117, 178
Whitman, Walt, 15, 135
Wilkins, Maurice, 34
Wilson, Robert, 154
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 41
x-ray diffraction patterns, 32–35, 56
Z boson, 174, 234–35
Zweig, George, 111–12
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
About the Author
Frank Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work he did as a graduate student. He was among the earliest MacArthur fellows, and has won many awards both for his scientific work and his writing. He is the author of A Beautiful Question, The Lightness of Being, Fantastic Realities, Longing for the Harmonies, and hundreds of articles in leading scientific journals. His "Wilczek's Universe" column appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal. Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founding director of the T. D. Lee Institute and chief scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center in Shanghai, China, and a distinguished professor at Arizona State University and Stockholm University.
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* Here, with Newton, we have anticipated a major theme of chapter 4.
* Quarks also carry nonvanishing electric charges. Here there is a distinction between two kinds of quarks—the u quark, whose electric charge is ⅔, and the d quark, whose electric charge is −⅓. Protons coalesce around two u quarks and one d quark,
so their electric charge is ⅔ + ⅔ − ⅓ = 1. Neutrons coalesce around one u quark and two d quarks, so their electric charge is ⅔ − ⅓ − ⅓ = 0.
* Robert Laughlin, Horst Störmer, and Dan Tsui shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery.
* Here by “fundamental” laws I mean laws that cannot be derived, even in principle, from other laws. Laws can be profoundly important and central to our understanding of nature without being “fundamental” in this sense. The second law of thermodynamics is a good example of that.
* That is, more forceful.
* The terms “photon field” and “electromagnetic field” are interchangeable.
* And also a small proportion of antiquarks—that’s a complication I’ll spare you here.
* According to Newton’s third law of motion, action = reaction, the felt force is equal in magnitude to the exerted force.
* Here we consider space-time as a geometric object. Adding time to space results in a geometric object—space-time—that has one more dimension than space itself, but can still be discussed using geometric concepts.
* And discuss in the appendix.
* The hypothetical strings are both very tiny and very stiff, so they’re both hard to discern and hard to excite.
* This aspect of the weak force is discussed in chapter 8.
* We’ll explore this more fully in chapter 8.
* Full disclosure: These calculations involve extrapolating the laws well beyond where they have been tested, and the agreement is only approximate. A more conservative way to state the situation is that the calculations work well enough to establish a suspicious “coincidence.”
* I have not described how humans actually arose, historically, nor have I described what the human agenda is, or should be. Those are grand subjects, but they belong in books different from this one.
* Some elements can occur as a few different isotopes. Here the atoms have similar chemical properties, but they have different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei. We encountered an example earlier, in chapter 2, when we discussed carbon dating.
* The full quantum-mechanical description of a system is much more elaborate than its classical description. We’ll explore this more deeply in the final chapter. This gives us, in principle, a bigger sketchpad—but one that is strange and hard to work with. Quantum information technology is a research frontier.
* Here we say answers are “good” if they are easy to state, mathematically precise, and agree with observation.
* Here we rely on the fact that the same fundamental laws of physics apply when we run time backward. This is very nearly—though not exactly—true. Why? That question introduces a grand mystery, which we’ll take up in chapter 9.
* This is explained further in the appendix.
* That is, it fits together with all the other evidence into a consistent picture.
* We need to be wary here of nuclear burning in stars, whose alchemy transforms atomic nuclei, as we’ve discussed earlier.
* It’s spelled out in the appendix.
* A round balloon will look much flatter if you blow it up to the size of Earth.
* Individual gravitons are probably beyond the reach of present-day technology, but the cumulative effect of many of them, filling the sky, is a realistic target.
* Time crystals are physical systems that spontaneously settle into stable loops of behavior. I proposed this concept in 2012, and many interesting examples have been discovered since then, both theoretically and experimentally.
* Unified theories suggest that protons are unstable, as we’ve discussed earlier. They also suggest the existence of excellent “catalysts” for proton decay—the so-called magnetic monopoles, or possibly cosmic strings. Thus, this speculation is not entirely groundless.
* Axions can be burned, in principle, but the energies you can generate this way are pathetic by solar standards, so this seems to be a last-ditch option.
* It is ambiguous because there are areas of the brain where information from several senses gets integrated, for example.
* There are several kinds of anomalous color perception, misnamed “color blindness,” that are not terribly rare. Around 95 percent of humans have similar color vision, based on three types of cone cells that vary little between individuals. There are theoretical reasons, based on genetics, to believe that a significant fraction of humans, specifically mothers and full sisters of males with the most common color anomaly, have four kinds of cone cells. These “tetrachromats” might have super-normal color vision. But as far as I know, direct evidence for this is surprisingly scant.
* That is, a diverse range of related species. There are more than 450 recognized species of mantis shrimp.
* That is, what we think we know how to do.
* As did several others. This is not the place, nor am I the scholar, to present the complicated history surrounding the genesis of the theory.
* Beams of electrons, antielectrons, antiprotons, photons, and various atomic nuclei, and even neutrinos and antineutrinos, have all been used at high-energy accelerators, for different kinds of experiments. The discovery of the Higgs particle was done using two colliding beams of protons.
* Many photon pairs are produced by other processes, but only pairs with a distinctive amount of energy and momentum can be ascribed to Higgs decays. By comparing the rate of production for pairs with and without the favored amount of energy and momentum—on-resonance and off-resonance, we say—you define “the excess.”
* One feature they share is that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light.
* Several kilometers, eventually.
* There’s more on this in our concluding chapter.
* I’m aware that these two sentences are a crude description of a very complex reality. They are correct in spirit, and sufficient for me to make my point.
* Of course, why that happened is an obvious follow-up question. We discussed some relevant ideas, specifically inflation and complexity within simplicity, in chapters 6 and 7.
* Alternatively, your answers might put the kid to sleep.
* K mesons are highly unstable, strong interacting particles (hadrons) whose properties can be, and have been, studied in great detail at high-energy accelerators. They are the lightest hadrons that contain strange (s) quarks.
* Of course, no scientific principles are sacred in a dogmatic, theological sense. But if relativity, quantum mechanics, or locality is wrong, we’ve got a lot of unlearning to do, because those principles work well and explain a lot. In other words, they’re probably closer to rock bottom than T is.
* For more on these “bonus” particles, see the appendix. The details are not crucial for what follows.
* The difference could supply the dark matter of the universe, as we’ll soon discuss.
* If the particles move too fast, they blur the growth of gravitational instabilities, and you get model universes that don’t look like ours.
* Steven Weinberg had the same realization, independently.
* And also the cosmic asymmetry between matter and antimatter.
* Lasker also did important work in pure mathematics.
* In the preceding discussion of uncertainty, I have spoken of position versus velocity. In the physics literature, it is more common—and, for technical reasons, more convenient—to speak of momentum instead of velocity. Having inserted this footnote, I will continue to use velocity, which is more familiar to most people.
* Those are two phrases, endemic in popular science journalism, that I find extremely irritating.
* Archaeopteryx was a species with both dinosaur-like and bird-like features, linking dinosaurs that were bound to the earth and the birds we admire in the air today.
* More precisely, nobody has succeeded in convincing anybody else that they’ve succeeded.
* We can put this more poetically: They are stars that cast the same rainbows, up to overall brightness.
* The two Magellanic Clouds are minor galaxies that neighbor our own Milky Way. Prominent features of the Southern Hemisphere sky, they were used by Polynesian navigators long before Magellan.
* Lemaître’s basic theoretical work predated Hubble’s observations.
* To be sure, it would take great patience to measure days in heartbeats. But one can use the progress of shadows, for example, to divide the day more finely.
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