Quantum Legacies: Dispatches From an Uncertain World

by David Kaiser

  26. Several reviewers highlighted this “ideological” use of Capra’s book: physicists could use it as a hedge against antiscientific sentiments of the day. See Kauffman, “Tao of Physics,” 461; Restivo, “Parallels and Paradoxes, Part II,” 39, 43, 45, 47, 53; and Scerri, “Eastern Mysticism,” 688.

  27. Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics, 164–69, 276–83, 312–13.

  28. See also Cyrus C. M. Mody, “Santa Barbara Physicists in the Vietnam Era,” in Kaiser and McCray, Groovy Science, 70–106.

  Chapter 10

  Portions of this essay originally appeared in London Review of Books 31 (17 December 2009): 19–20; and in London Review of Books, 22 March 2010 (online).

  1. My internship was with a portion of the Solenoidal Detector Collaboration.

  2. David Kaiser, “Distinguishing a Charged Higgs Signal from a Heavy WR Signal,” Physics Letters B 306 (1993): 125–28.

  3. Daniel Kevles, “Preface, 1995: The Death of the Superconducting Super Collider in the Life of American Physics,” in The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (1978), 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), ix–xlii; Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne Kolb, Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Joseph Martin, Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), chap. 9.

  4. John Heilbron and Robert Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 135, 235–40, 478–84.

  5. Recounted in Robert Serber with Robert P. Crease, Peace and War: Reminiscences of a Life on the Frontiers of Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 148.

  6. Peter Westwick, The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947–1974 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

  7. Richard Hewlett and Francis Duncan, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, vol. 2, Atomic Shield, 1947–1952 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), 249–50; Robert Seidel, “Accelerating Science: The Postwar Transformation of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 13 (1983): 375–400, on 394–97; and Henry DeWolf Smyth as quoted in Robert Seidel, “A Home for Big Science: The Atomic Energy Commission’s Laboratory System,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 16 (1986): 135–75, on 148 (“big groups of scientists”).

  8. Joseph Platt to Paul McDaniel memorandum, 27 July 1961, as quoted in Robert Seidel, “The Postwar Political Economy of High-Energy Physics,” in Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s, ed. Laurie Brown, Max Dresden, and Lillian Hoddeson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 497–507, on 502.

  9. Fermilab founding director Robert Wilson’s 1969 congressional testimony is quoted in Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne Kolb, and Catherine Westfall, Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 13–14.

  10. See, e.g., Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1993); Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi, The God Particle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); cf. Martin, Solid State Insurrection, chap. 9. On the early years of the SSC project, see Riordan, Hoddeson, and Kolb, Tunnel Visions, chaps. 2–3.

  11. Geoff Brumfiel, “LHC Sees Particles Circulate Once More,” Nature, 23 November 2009, doi:10.1038/news.2009.1104.

  12. Ian Sample, “Totally Stuffed: CERN’s Electrocuted Weasel to Go on Display,” Guardian, 27 January 2017.

  13. See, e.g., Dominique Pestre and John Krige, “Some Thoughts on the Early History of CERN,” in Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, ed. Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 78–99.

  Chapter 11

  Portions of this essay originally appeared in London Review of Books 31 (17 December 2009): 19–20.

  1. Murray Gell-Mann, “A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons,” Physics Letters 8 (1964): 214–15. Preprints of Zweig’s 1964 papers are available on the CERN website: George Zweig, “An SU3 Model for Strong Interaction Symmetry and Its Breaking,” version 1 (dated 17 January 1964), http://cds.cern.ch/record/352337/files; and George Zweig, “An SU3 Model for Strong Interaction Symmetry and Its Breaking,” version 2 (dated 21 February 1964), http://cds.cern.ch/record/570209/files. See also Michael Riordan, The Hunting of the Quark: A True Story of Modern Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).

  2. See, e.g., Lillian Hoddeson, Laurie Brown, Michael Riordan, and Max Dresden, eds., The Rise of the Standard Model (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  3. MIT physicist Frank Wilczek has described this process as a migration from “c-world to p-world,” an almost alchemical transformation of concepts into physical stuff in the world around us. See Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces (New York: Basic, 2008), 186.

  4. Peter Galison, How Experiments End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chap. 4.

  5. For an accessible account, see Wilczek, Lightness of Being.

  6. Adrian Cho, “At Long Last, Physicists Calculate the Proton’s Mass,” Science, 21 November 2008.

  Chapter 12

  Portions of this essay originally appeared in London Review of Books 33 (25 August 2011): 20; in London Review of Books, 6 July 2012 (online); and in Huffington Post, 10 February 2014.

  1. Feynman quoted in Michael Riordan, The Hunting of the Quark: A True Story of Modern Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 152.

  2. Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi, The God Particle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

  3. See, e.g., Lillian Hoddeson, Laurie Brown, Michael Riordan, and Max Dresden, eds., The Rise of the Standard Model (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap. 28; and Sean Carroll, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World (New York: Dutton, 2012), chap. 8.

  4. F. Englert and R. Brout, “Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons,” Physical Review Letters 13 (1964): 321–23; Peter Higgs, “Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons,” Physical Review Letters 13 (1964): 508–9; and G. S. Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and T. W. B. Kibble, “Global Conservation Laws and Massless Particles,” Physical Review Letters 13 (1964): 585–87.

  5. Frank Wilczek, “Thanks, Mom! Finding the Quantum of Ubiquitous Resistance,” NOVA: The Nature of Reality (blog), 4 July 2012, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2012/07/thanks-mom; and John Ellis, “What Is the Higgs Boson?,” https://videos.cern.ch/record/1458922.

  6. See, e.g., Carroll, Particle at the End of the Universe.

  7. See Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

  8. John Gunion, Howard Haber, Gordon Kane, and Sally Dawson, The Higgs Hunter’s Guide (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990).

  9. A video of the 13 December 2011 CERN press conference is available at https://videos.cern.ch/record/1406043.

  10. G. Aad et al. (ATLAS Collaboration), “Observation of a New Particle in the Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC,” Physics Letters B 716 (2012): 1–29; and S. Chatrchyan et al. (CMS Collaboration), “Observation of a New Boson at a Mass of 125 GeV with the CMS Experiment at the LHC,” Physics Letters B 716 (2012): 30–61.

  11. Based on searches in titles, abstracts, and keywords for “Higgs” and/or “electroweak symmetry breaking” in the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge database (formerly the Science Citation Index).

  12. Matthew Strassler, Of Particular Significance (blog), 4 July 2012, https://profmattstrassler.com/2012/07/04/the-day-of-the-higgs.

  Chapter 13

  Versions of this essay originally appeared in Social Studies of Science 36 (August 2006): 533–64; and in Scientific American 296 (June 2007): 62–69. Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2007, Scientific American, a Division of Springer Natu
re America, Inc. All rights reserved.

  1. F. L. Bezrukov and M. E. Shaposhnikov, “The Standard Model Higgs Boson as the Inflaton,” Physics Letters B 659 (2008): 703, https://arxiv.org/abs/0710.3755.

  2. E.g., D. I. Kaiser, “Constraints in the Context of Induced Gravity Inflation,” Physical Review D 49 (1994): 6347–53, https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9308043; D. I. Kaiser, “Induced-Gravity Inflation and the Density Perturbation Spectrum,” Physics Letters B 340 (1994): 23–28, https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9405029; and D. I. Kaiser, “Primordial Spectral Indices from Generalized Einstein Theories,” Physical Review D 52 (1995): 4295–4306, https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9408044.

  3. Rates of preprints derived from data available at https://arxiv.org (accessed 24 October 2018).

  4. See, e.g., Max Jammer, Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961); and Max Jammer, Concepts of Mass in Contemporary Physics and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  5. For an accessible introduction to Mach’s principle, see Clifford Will, Was Einstein Right? Putting General Relativity to the Test, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic, 1993), 149–53. See also Julian Barbour and Herbert Pfister, eds., Mach’s Principle: From Newton’s Bucket to Quantum Gravity (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1995). On Mach’s influences on Einstein, see esp. Gerald Holton, “Mach, Einstein, and the Search for Reality,” in Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 7; Carl Hoefer, “Einstein’s Struggle for a Machian Gravitation Theory,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25 (1994): 287–335; and Michel Janssen, “Of Pots and Holes: Einstein’s Bumpy Road to General Relativity,” Annalen der Physik 14 Suppl. (2005): 58–85.

  6. See, e.g., Laurie Brown, Max Dresden, and Lillian Hoddeson, eds., Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Laurie Brown and Helmut Rechenberg, The Origin of the Concept of Nuclear Forces (Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1996); and Lillian Hoddeson, Laurie Brown, Michael Riordan, and Max Dresden, eds., The Rise of the Standard Model: Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  7. Carl H. Brans, “Mach’s Principle and a Varying Gravitational Constant” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1961); Carl H. Brans and Robert H. Dicke, “Mach’s Principle and a Relativistic Theory of Gravitation,” Physical Review 124 (1961): 925–35. On the Caltech group, see Will, Was Einstein Right?, 156. Other physicists had introduced similar modifications to general relativity before the Brans-Dicke work, though the earlier efforts had not attracted widespread attention within the community. See Hubert Goenner, “Some Remarks on the Genesis of Scalar-Tensor Theories,” General Relativity and Gravitation 44 (2012): 2077, https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.3455; and Carl H. Brans, “Varying Newton’s Constant: A Personal History of Scalar-Tensor Theories,” Einstein Online 04 (2010): 1002.

  8. Jeffrey Goldstone, “Field Theories with ‘Superconductor’ Solutions,” Nuovo cimento 19 (1961): 154–64. See also Laurie Brown and Tian-Yu Cao, “Spontaneous Breakdown of Symmetry: Its Rediscovery and Integration into Quantum Field Theory,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 21 (1991): 211–35; and Laurie Brown, Robert Brout, Tian Yu Cao, Peter Higgs, and Yoichiro Nambu, “Panel Session: Spontaneous Breaking of Symmetry,” in Hoddeson et al., Rise of the Standard Model, 478–522.

  9. Peter W. Higgs, “Broken Symmetries, Massless Particles, and Gauge Fields,” Physics Letters B 12 (1964): 132–33; Peter W. Higgs, “Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons,” Physical Review Letters 13 (1964): 508–9; and Peter W. Higgs, “Spontaneous Symmetry Breakdown without Massless Bosons,” Physical Review 145 (1966): 1156–63.

  10. See https://inspirehep.net.

  11. These statistics concern citations within the Web of Knowledge database (formerly the Science Citation Index) to the 1961 Brans-Dicke article and to either of Higgs’s 1964 articles and/or his 1966 article; during this period, physicists tended to cite some or all the Higgs papers together. I tracked citations using Web of Knowledge rather than the high-energy physics database Inspire because during the early 1960s, coverage within Inspire tended to focus more narrowly around particle physics rather than gravitation and cosmology. Nonetheless, by October 2018, Inspire included 2,998 citations to the 1961 Brans-Dicke paper, while Higgs’s 1964 papers have accumulated 4,893 and 4,192 citations within the Inspire database (respectively), and his 1966 paper has 2,867 citations within Inspire. At that time, Inspire included citation statistics on more than 1 million articles, only 123 of which had been cited 2,998 times or more. See https://inspirehep.net/search?of=hcs&action_search=Search (accessed 24 October 2018).

  12. Similarly, although Goldstone’s 1961 article on spontaneous symmetry breaking received 487 citations within the Web of Knowledge database between 1961 and 1981, only one paper cited both the Brans-Dicke and Goldstone papers during that period.

  13. Physics Survey Committee, Physics: Survey and Outlook (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1966), 38–45, 52, 95, 111.

  14. Cf., e.g., Y. B. Zel’dovich and I. D. Novikov, Relativistic Astrophysics, vol. 2, trans. Leslie Fishbone (1975; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), with Steven Weinberg, Gravitation and Cosmology (New York: Wiley, 1972).

  15. David Gross and Frank Wilczek, “Ultraviolet Behavior of Nonabelian Gauge Theories,” Physical Review Letters 30 (1973): 1343–46; David Gross and Frank Wilczek, “Asymptotically Free Gauge Theories, I,” Physical Review D 8 (1973): 3633–52; David Gross and Frank Wilczek, “Asymptotically Free Gauge Theories, II,” Physical Review D 9 (1974): 980–93; H. David Politzer, “Reliable Perturbative Results for Strong Interactions?,” Physical Review Letters 30 (1973): 1346–49; and H. David Politzer, “Asymptotic Freedom: An Approach to Strong Interactions,” Physics Reports 14 (1974): 129–80.

  16. Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow, “Unity of All Elementary Particle Forces,” Physical Review Letters 32 (1974): 438–41. See also Jogesh Pati and Abdus Salam, “Unified Lepton-Hadron Symmetry and a Gauge Theory of the Basic Interactions,” Physical Review D 8 (1973): 1240–51.

  17. See, e.g., Heinz Pagels, The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature (New York: Bantam, 1982), 275–77; Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Penguin, 1984), 159–60; John Gribben, In Search of the Big Bang: Quantum Physics and Cosmology (New York: Bantam, 1986), 293, 307, 312, 321, 345; Robert Adair, The Great Design: Particles, Fields, and Creation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 357; Alan Guth, “Starting the Universe: The Big Bang and Cosmic Inflation,” in Bubbles, Voids, and Bumps in Time: The New Cosmology, ed. J. Cornell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 105–6; Edward W. Kolb, Blind Watchers of the Sky: The People and Ideas That Shaped Our View of the Universe (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 277–80; and Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 177. See also Marcia Bartusiak, Thursday’s Universe: A Report from the Frontier on the Origin, Nature, and Destiny of the Universe (New York: Times Books, 1986), 227; Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way (New York: Anchor, 1988), 336–37; and Dennis Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 204, 234.

  18. David Schramm, “Cosmology and New Particles,” in Particles and Fields, 1977, ed. P. A. Schreiner, G. H. Thomas, and A. B. Wicklund (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1978), 87–101; Gary Steigman, “Cosmology Confronts Particle Physics,” Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science 29 (1979): 313–37; and R. J. Tayler, “Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Elementary Particle Physics,” Reports on Progress in Physics 43 (1980): 253–99. Steigman makes passing reference in his introduction to the new work on grand unification but explicitly labels GUTs as “beyond the scope of this review” (328, 336). Georgi and Glashow’s (now-famo
us) 1974 paper on GUTs (“Unity of All Elementary Particle Forces”) received fewer than 50 citations worldwide per year between 1974 and 1978, rapidly rising to more than 200 citations per year beginning in 1980. Anthony Zee likewise recalls that GUTs received little attention, even from particle theorists, until the very end of the 1970s: Anthony Zee, An Old Man’s Toy: Gravity at Work and Play in Einstein’s Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 117.

  19. David Kaiser, “Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33 (2002): 131–59; and David Kaiser, “Booms, Busts, and the World of Ideas: Enrollment Pressures and the Challenge of Specialization,” Osiris 27 (2012): 276–302. See also Daniel Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), chaps. 24–25.