Knocking on Heaven's Door (69 page)

21
. Matthew 7:7–8.

22
. Blackwell, Richard J.
Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible
(University of Notre Dame Press, 1991).

23
. Quoted in Gerald Holton, “Johannes Kepler’s Universe: Its Physics and Metaphysics,”
American Journal of Physics
24 (May 1956): 340–351.

24
. Calvin, John.
Institutes of Christian Religion
, trans. by F. L. Battles in
A Reformation Reader
, Denis R. Janz, ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999).

25
. For example, in ancient Greece, stadia didn’t have a fixed length since they were based on different body part lengths in different regions and in different times.

26
. There is, of course, an electromagnetic field, but there is virtually no actual matter.

27
. Momentum is a quantity that is approximated by the product of mass and velocity at small speeds but is equal to the energy divided by the speed of light for objects moving at relativistic velocities.

28
. Gamow, George.
One, Two, Three… Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science
(Viking Adult, September 1947).

29
. Note that this figure corresponds to a more precise version of unification than was true for the original Georgi-Glashow theory, in which the lines almost converged, but didn’t quite meet. This imperfect unification was demonstrated only later on, with better measurements of the forces’ interaction strengths.

30
. Although it comes close, we now know that unification won’t occur within the Standard Model. However, unification can happen in modifications of the Standard Model, such as the supersymmetric models considered in Chapter 17.

31
. Feynman, Richard. The QED Lecture at University of Auckland (New Zealand, 1979). See also:
Richard Feynman Lectures, Proving the Obviously Untrue
.

32
. Quoted, for example, in Richard Rhodes,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(Simon & Schuster, 1986).

33
. Particle physicists measure energy in units of electronvolts and those are the units I will use throughout. An electronvolt (eV) is the energy acquired by a free electron when accelerated through an electric potential difference of one volt. More commonly, I will refer to the units GeV, which is a billion electron-volts, and a TeV, which is a trillion electronvolts.

34
. Ironically, the plot of Dan Brown’s
Angels and Demons
centers on antimatter, whereas the LHC is the first CERN collider for which the initial states are purely matter.

35
. Overbye, Dennis. “Collider Sets Record and Europe Takes U. S. Lead.”
New York Times
, December 9, 2009.

36
. In 1997, the European Physical Society recognized Robert Brout, François Englert, and Peter Higgs for their achievement, and the three were once again awarded in 2004 with the Wolf Prize in Physics. François Englert, Robert Brout, Peter Higgs, Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble all received the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics from the American Physical Society in 2010. I will refer only to Higgs and Peter Higgs throughout the text, as my focus is the physical mechanism and not the personalities. Of course if the Higgs is discovered, only three at most will receive a Nobel Prize and priority issues will be important. For an overview of the situation, see, for example, Luis Álvarez-Gaumé and John Ellis, “Eyes on a Prize Particle,”
Nature Physics
7 (January 2011).

37
. It is ambiguous whether the Standard Model should also include the very heavy right-handed neutrinos that are likely to exist and play a role in neutrino masses.

38
. Its original purpose was to accelerate protons and antiprotons, but currently only protons, in its current use as the SPS accelerator at the LHC.

39
.
Physical Review D
, 035009 (2008).

40
. http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report.pdf.

41
. See, for example, Taibbi, Matt. “The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution,”
Rolling Stone
, March 2009.

42
. This point is also addressed, for example, in J. D. Graham and J. B. Wiener,
Risk vs. Risk: Tradeoffs in Protecting Health and Environment
(Harvard University Press, 1995), especially Chapter 11.

43
. See also, for example, Slovic, Paul. “Perception of Risk,”
Science
236, 280–285, no. 4799 (1987). Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability,”
Cognitive Psychology
5 (1973): 207–232. Sunstein, Cass R., and Timur Kuran. “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,”
Stanford Law Review
51 (1999):683–768. Slovic, Paul “If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act: Psychic Numbing and Genocide,”
Judgment and Decision Making
2, no. 2 (2007): 79–95.

44
. See also, for example, Kousky, Carolyn, and Roger Cooke.
The Unholy Trinity: Fat Tails, Tail Dependence, and Micro-Correlations
, RFF Discussion Paper 09-36-REV (November 2009). Kunreuther, Howard, and M. Useem.
Learning from Catastrophes: Strategies for Reaction and Response
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing). Kunreuther, Howard.
Reflections and Guiding Principles for Dealing with Societal Risks
, in
The Irrational Economist: Overcoming Irrational Decisions in a Dangerous World
, E. Michel-Kerjan and P. Slovic, eds., New York Public Affairs Books 2010. Weitzman, Martin L.,
On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change
, Review of Economics and Statistics, 2009.

45
. See, for example, Joe Nocera’s cover story on “Risk Mismanagement” in the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
, January 4, 2009.

46
. The problem of irreversibility has been addressed by some economists, including Arrow, Kenneth J., and Anthony C. Fisher, “Environmental Preservation, Uncertainty, and Irreversibility,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
, 88 (1974): 312–319. Gollier, Christian, and Nicolas Treich, “Decision Making under Uncertainty: The Economics of the Precautionary Principle,”
Journal of Risk and Uncertainty
27, no. 7 (2003). Wiener, Jonathan B. “Global Environmental Regulation,”
Yale Law Journal
108 (1999): 677–800.

47
. E.g., Richard Posner,
Catastrophe: Risk and Response
(Oxford University Press, 2004).

48
. Leonhardt, David. “The Fed Missed This Bubble: Will It See a New One?”
New York Times
, January 5, 2010.

49
. In this book, I use the term “systematic uncertainty,” rather than the more commonly used term “systematic error.” Errors are often associated with mistakes, whereas uncertainty refers to the inevitable level of imprecision, given your apparatus.

50
. Again, people commonly use the term statistical error to refer to an uncertain measurement due to finite statistics.

51
. Kristof, Nicholas. “New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer,”
New York Times
, May 6, 2010.

52
. This quote has also been attributed to Robert Storm Peterson and Niels Bohr.

53
. This table includes separate entries for left- and right-handed particles. These particles are distinguished by their chirality, which for massless particles tells the spin along the direction of motion. Masses mix the two—such as a left-and right-handed electron. The precise distinguishing feature is less important for this table than the difference in their interactions. If all particles were massless, the weak force that changed up-type into down-type quarks and charged into neutral leptons would act only on left-handed particles. The strong and electromagnetic forces, on the other hand, act on both, with only the quarks charged under the strong force.

54
. The three types of neutrinos get paired via the weak force with the three charged leptons. However, once they are produced, neutrinos can oscillate into each other, no longer remaining identified solely by the charged lepton with which they are paired. The neutrinos will sometimes be labeled simply with numbers to refer to their relative mass and sometimes with labels referring to the charged lepton according to the context.

55
. If the initial
b
meson is neutral, you instead see a track that originates from the decay point, with no precursor track from the neutral initial state.

56
. The interaction among the
W
, the top quark, and the bottom quark is however the reason the top can decay into a bottom and a
W
.

57
. One can also define a relativistic mass that depends on momentum and energy, but the implication is the same.

58
. Notice that this spread distinguishes bosons and fermions, classes of particles distinguished by quantum mechanics. Force carriers and the hypothetical Higgs particles are bosons. All other Standard Model particles are fermions.

59
. Quoted in Stewart, Ian.
Why Beauty Is Truth
(Basic Books, 2007).

60
. On WNYC’s
The Takeaway
, March 31, 2007.

61
. Sometimes people also debate whether right-handed neutrinos belong in the Standard Model. Even if present, they are likely to be extremely heavy and not very important for lower-energy processes.

62
. http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1101/1101.1628v1.pdf.

63
. This is discussed in much greater detail in
Warped Passages
.

64
. Again, this is discussed at length in
Warped Passages
. The original paper is Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum,
Physical Review
Letters 83 (1999):4690–4693.

65
. Arkani-Hamed, Nima, Savas Dimopoulos, Gia Dvali,
Physics Letters
B429 (1998): 263–272; Arkani-Hamed, Nima Savas Dimopoulos, Gia Dvali,
Physical Review
D59:086004, 1999.

66
. Randall, Lisa, and Raman Sundrum,
Physical Review Letters
83 (1999):3370–3373.

67
. Original short film
Powers of Ten
by Ray Eames and Charles Eames, 1968;
Powers of Ten: A Flip Book
by Charles and Ray Eames (W. H. Freeman Publishers, 1998); also Philip Morrison and Phylis Morrison and the office of Charles and Ray Eames,
Powers of Ten: About the Relative Sizes of Things in the Universe
(W. H. Freeman Publishers, 1982).

68
. See e.g., Alan Guth’s
The Inflationary Universe
(Perseus Books, 1997) for a more extensive discussion of this point.

69
. Some dark matter particles are their own antiparticles, in which case they need to find other similar particles.

70
. Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pioneered the concept of flow to describe this phenomenon in his book
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(Random House, 2002).

71
. Brooks, David. “Genius: The Modern View,”
New York Times
, April 30, 2009.

72
. Gladwell, Malcolm.
Outliers: The Story of Success
(Little Brown & Co., 2008).

73
. Gell-Mann, Murray.
The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex
(W.H. Freeman & Company, 1994).

74
.
Teacher’s Edition of Current Science 49
, no. 14 (January 6–10, 1964).

75
.
Verborgene Universen
in German.

76
. In German, “rand” means “edge” and “all” means “universe.”

77
. See, too, for example, Susan Jacoby,
The Age of American Unreason
(Pantheon, 2008).