Quantum Legacies: Dispatches From an Uncertain World
Page 29
5. Quoted in Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy, 48–49.
6. Quoted in Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy, 46 (Eddington), 56 (Tolman). On Eddington’s approach, see also Matthew Stanley, Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
7. Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic, 1997); and Adam Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
8. “Topics of the Times,” New York Times, 6 February 1923, 18; Simeon Strunsky, “About Books, More or Less: Excessively Up to Date,” New York Times, 29 April 1928, BR3; “By-Products: In the Matter of Einstein, Tea-Kettles, Destiny, &c.,” New York Times, 22 March 1931, E1; and “Improving on Relativity,” New York Times, 15 March 1939, 18.
9. On the Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, see Michael Aaron Dennis, “‘Our First Line of Defense’: Two University Laboratories in the Postwar American State,” Isis 85 (1994): 427–55.
10. Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy, chap. 3.
11. George Gamow, The Creation of the Universe (New York: Viking, 1952); and George Gamow, “The Role of Turbulence in the Evolution of the Universe,” Physical Review 86 (1952): 251.
12. Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy, chap. 4.
13. Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (New York: Harper, 1950). See also Helge Kragh, “Naming the Big Bang,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 44 (2012): 3–36.
14. Ronald Numbers, The Creationists (New York: Knopf, 1992), chap. 10.
15. Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy, chap. 7; and Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (New York: Basic, 1977).
16. Dean Rickles, A Brief History of String Theory (New York: Springer, 2014). See also Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
17. Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). See also Peter Woit, The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law (New York: Basic, 2006).
18. See, e.g., Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (New York: Ecco, 2005).
19. Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (New York: Little, Brown, 2005).
20. “Billionaires: The Richest People in the World,” Forbes, 5 March 2019, https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/#3e3f70c1251c.
21. For an accessible introduction to inflationary cosmology, see Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (New York: Basic, 1997).
22. Susskind, Cosmic Landscape; and Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007). On earlier discussions of the “anthropic principle” in physics, see John Barrow and Frank Tipler, eds., The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
23. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686), trans. H. A. Hargreaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Isaac Newton, Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Bentley, Containing Some Arguments in Proof of a Deity (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1756). See also Rob Iliffe, “The Religion of Isaac Newton,” in The Cambridge Companion to Newton, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 485–523.
24. Susskind, Cosmic Landscape, vii.
25. See, e.g., Dennis Overbye, “Zillions of Universes? Or Did Ours Get Lucky?,” New York Times, 28 October 2003.
26. Bacon quoted in James Glanz, “Science vs. the Bible: Debate Moves to the Cosmos,” New York Times, 10 October 1999.
27. Laurie Goodstein, “Judge Rejects Teaching Intelligent Design,” New York Times, 21 December 2005; and Andrew Revkin, “A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA,” New York Times, 8 February 2006. See also John Brockman, ed., Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement (New York: Vintage, 2006).
28. Numbers, Creationists, chap. 9.
29. David F. Coppedge, “State of the Cosmos Address Offered,” 21 February 2005, https://crev.info/2005/02/state_of_the_cosmos_address_offered. Cf. Alan Guth and David Kaiser, “Inflationary Cosmology: Exploring the Universe from the Smallest to the Largest Scales,” Science 307 (11 February 2005): 884–90, https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0502328.
Chapter 17
A version of this essay originally appeared in London Review of Books 33 (17 February 2011): 36–37.
1. Dennis Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
2. On the COBE mission, see, e.g., George Smoot with Keay Davidson, Wrinkles in Time (New York: William Morrow, 1993).
3. The numerical values quoted here come from N. Aghanim et al. (Planck Collaboration), “Planck 2018 Results, VI: Cosmological Parameters,” http://arxiv.org/abs/1807.06209. After the Planck team released its 2015 measurements, other groups, using observations of distinct astrophysical phenomena (such as supernovae), have measured a value for the Hubble expansion rate that differs by about 8 percent from the Planck value. Whether the distinct measurements will eventually converge or whether the modest discrepancy points to some new, unexplained physics remains to be seen. See Joshua Sokol, “Hubble Trouble,” Science, 10 March 2017, 1010–14.
4. For an accessible introduction, see, e.g., David Weintraub, How Old Is the Universe? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
5. Penrose describes much of this work in Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time (New York: Knopf, 2010).
6. Aaron Wright, “The Origins of Penrose Diagrams in Physics, Art, and the Psychology of Perception, 1958–1962,” Endeavor 37, no. 3 (2013): 133–39. See also Aaron Wright, “The Advantages of Bringing Infinity to a Finite Place: Penrose Diagrams as Objects of Intuition,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 44, no. 2 (2014): 99–139.
7. Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (New York: Ecco, 2005).
8. V. G. Gurzadyan and R. Penrose, “Concentric Circles in WMAP Data May Provide Evidence of Violent Pre-Big-Bang Activity,” http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3706; and V. G. Gurzadyan and R. Penrose, “More on the Low Variance Circles in CMB Sky,” http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1486. Penrose has continued to investigate these ideas: V. G. Gurzadyan and R. Penrose, “CCC-Predicted Low-Variance Circles in CMB Sky and LCDM,” http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.5675; V. G. Gurzadyan and R. Penrose, “On CCC-Predicted Concentric Low-Variance Circles in the CMB Sky,” European Physical Journal Plus 128 (2013): 22, http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.5162; V. G. Gurzadyan and R. Penrose, “CCC and the Fermi Paradox,” European Physical Journal Plus 131 (2016): 11, http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.00554; and Roger Penrose, “Correlated ‘Noise’ in LIGO Gravitational Wave Signals: An Implication of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology,” http://arxiv.org/abs/1707.04169. For the early responses that found no support for Penrose’s model within the WMAP data, see Adam Moss, Douglas Scott, and James Zibin, “No Evidence for Anomalously Low Variance Circles on the Sky,” Journal of Cosmology and Astro–Particle Physics 1104 (2011): 033, http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1305; I. K. Wehus and H. K. Eriksen, “A Search for Concentric Circles in the 7-Year WMAP Temperature Sky Maps,” Astrophysical Journal 733 (2011): L29, http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1268; and Amir Hajian, “Are There Echoes from the Pre–Big Bang Universe? A Search for Low Variance Circles in the CMB Sky,” Astrophysical Journal 740 (2011): 52, http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1656.
Chapter 18
A version of this essay originally appeared in New York Times, 3 October 2017.
1. B. P. Abbott et al. (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration), “Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger,” Physical Review Le
tters 116 (2016): 061102, http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03837. See also Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues, and Other Songs from Outer Space (New York: Knopf, 2016); Stefan Helmreich, “Gravity’s Reverb: Listening to Space-Time, or Articulating the Sounds of Gravitational-Wave Detection,” Cultural Anthropology 31 (2016): 464–92; and Harry Collins, Gravity’s Kiss: The Detection of Gravitational Waves (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
2. Daniel Kennefick, Traveling at the Speed of Thought: Einstein and the Quest for Gravitational Waves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
3. See esp. Harry Collins, Gravity’s Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pt. 1.
4. Collins, Gravity’s Shadow, chap. 17.
5. Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, and John A. Wheeler, Gravitation (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973), 1014–18.
6. Weiss’s proposals and interim progress reports to the National Science Foundation, as quoted in Collins, Gravity’s Shadow, 280 (“Gravitation research”), 287 (“slowly come to the realization”).
7. Collins, Gravity’s Shadow, pt. 4. On the complicated process of selecting sites for the LIGO project, see also Tiffany Nichols, “Constructing Stillness: The Site Selection History and Signal Epistemological Development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)” (PhD diss., Harvard University, in preparation).
8. Based on data in the ProQuest “Dissertations and Theses” database, with keyword searches for “LIGO” in titles and abstracts.
9. Committee on Accuracy of Time Transfer in Satellite Systems, Air Force Studies Board, Accuracy of Time Transfer in Satellite Systems (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1986).
Chapter 19
A version of this essay originally appeared in New Yorker, 15 March 2018 (online).
1. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988). On publishing trends in popular physics around that time, see Elizabeth Leane, Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies (London: Ashgate, 2007).
2. Hélène Mialet, Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
3. Alan Guth et al., “A Cosmic Controversy,” Scientific American, July 2017, 5–7.
4. The short film is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi0BzqV_b44.
INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to figures.
aces, 165
Addison-Wesley, 117
aliens, 205–7, 214–16
allied nuclear weapons project, 71
Alpher, Ralph, 236, 237
American anti-Communist hysteria, 25
American Institute of Physics (AIP), 75, 106
American Journal of Physics, 148
American Psychiatric Association, 27
Antarctica, 58
anthropic principle, 244
antimatter, existence of, 22
anti-scientific sentiment, 148
asymptotic freedom, 193–95
ATLAS detector at CERN, 176
atomic decay, 35
Atomic Energy Commission, 83, 103; computer project funding, 94; funding to Lawrence’s Berkeley laboratory, 160; funding to particle accelerators and nuclear reactors, 82, 160–61. See also Manhattan Project (Manhattan Engineer District)
Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, 80
“atomic secrets,” 81
autism spectrum disorder, 28
Babbage, Charles, 90
Bach fugue, 168, 169; gremlin-elf-piano story, 168–69, 171
Bacon, John W., 246
Bamberger, Louis, 89
bar detector, 265
Barish, Barry, 264
Barton, Henry, 75; AIP bulletins, 77
Beckler, David Z., 107
Bell, John, 56, 57; freedom of choice, 57–58; inequality, 59, 60, 63
Bell’s theorem, 56
Benn, Christopher, 66
Berliner, Arnold, 36, 37
Bethe, Hans, 87, 126; consultant to nuclear weapons program, 87; nuclear physics, 87; nuclear reactions in stars, 87; shielding for nuclear reactors, 87; table of integrals, 87, 88, 96; Theoretical Physics Division at wartime Los Alamos, 87
Bevatron, 160
Bible-Science Association, 248
biblical literalism, 246
big bang, 58, 243
“big black book, the.” See Gravitation (Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler)
big science, 13
“billion-dollar boson,” 175
black holes, 205, 225; collisions, 262, 263
Bloch, Felix, 122
Bohm, David, 127, 128; Brazil, fled to, 129
Bohr, Niels, 17, 18, 24, 30, 136, 146; particles have definite values, 32–33
Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, 18
Böll, Heinrich, 17, 21
bomb tests, 42
Bondi, Hermann, 238, 239
Born, Max, 18
boson, 174. See also Higgs boson
Bousso, Raphael, 242
brane-world collisions, 255
Brans, Carl, 186–68, 187, 191
Brans-Dicke field, 188, 192, 193, 198
Brans-Dicke gravitational equation, 197
Brief History of Time, A (Hawking), 270–71
Brout, Robert, 177
Brussels, scientific meeting in (1927), 1–4, 6, 9
B-25 bombers, 73
Bush, Vannevar, 89
Capra, Fritjof, 136, 145; book launch, 143; Buddhism, 142; Confucianism, 142; Eastern spiritual traditions, 141; Hinduism, 142; PhD in theoretical particle physics, 137–38; postdoctoral fellowship in Paris, 138; returned to Europe, 139; Shambhala Press, 142; Taoism, 142; textbook on nuclear physics, 140, 141, 143; visit to Berkeley, 141; Weisskopf and, 141; writing abstracts, 139; Zen, 142
Casablanca, 45
Castaneda, Carlos, 215
causality, 126
Center for Particle Astrophysics at Fermilab, 200
Center for Scientific Creation, 248
Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union, 213
Central Intelligence Agency, 48, 99
CERN. See European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan, 225
citation-tracking database, 191
clash of cultures, 94
Close, Frank, 45
Cocconi, Giuseppe, 206–12, 208
coding bomb simulations, 92
Cold War, 7, 12, 98, 113, 240; end of, 157; model, 163; powers, 84
“cold war of the classrooms,” 99
Coleman, Sidney, 199
Collins, Harry, 267
Communist infiltration, 129
computer project, 95
Conant, James B., 73, 75; radar development, 74; US National Defense Research Committee, 73
conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC), 256
Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, 103
Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, 252
Cosmic Bell collaboration, 60, 60–61
Cosmic Bell test setup, 62
cosmic expansion, 233
Cosmic Landscape, The: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (Susskind), 245
cosmic microwave background radiation, 196, 254, 261–62
Cowan, Clyde, 42–43, 47; bomb-based test, 43; neutrinos detection, 43, 44
Creation of the Universe, The (Gamow), 238
Creation Science Association, 248
Curie, Marie, 17
curriculum for physics students, 116–17, 199
cyclotrons, 158–59
Dance of Shiva from Hindu mythology, 138
Dancing Wu Li Masters, The (Zukav), 150
dark matter, 171
Darwin, Charles, 248; Darwinian natural selection, 247; Darwin’s theory, 235, 240
Daston, Lorraine, 88
Davies, Paul, 209, 212, 215; Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts
, 210; METI, 215; SETI contacts, 211–12
de Broglie, Louis, 17
Delbruck, Max, 24
Department of Defense, 83, 103
Department of Energy, 216
Deutsch, George, 247
DeWitt, Nicholas, 99–107, 110
DeYoung, Donald, 246
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 27–28
Dicke, Robert, 186–68, 191–92
Dirac, Paul, 7, 18–23, 21, 24, 27, 28; antimatter, existence of, 22; family dynamics, 26; Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, 23; Nobel Prize with Schrödinger (1933), 23; notion of quantum “spin,” 22; relativistic equation for the electron, 22; Royal Society, 23; on the Soviet Union, 23–24; “Tube Alloys” project, 24
Dismantling the Big Bang (Williams and Hartnett), 246
Doolittle, James, 105
double-well potential, 188
Drake, Frank, 206, 209, 210, 212, 213, 215
Drake equation, 209, 217
DuBridge, Lee, 103
DuPont chemical engineers, 81