Knocking on Heaven's Door (68 page)

I am grateful to several others for encouraging me early on in the somewhat challenging enterprise I’d set out to pursue. Thanks to John Brockman and Ecco’s Dan Halpern for getting this book off the ground, and to Matt Weiland, and his assistant, Shanna Milkey, for helping connect the pieces. Thanks, too, to the others at Ecco who helped make this book a reality, and to Andrew Wylie for shepherding the final stages. I am also pleased to have worked with the great illustrating team of Tommy McCall, Ana Becker, and Richert Schnorr, who conveyed complicated ideas with clear and precise pictures.

Finally, thanks to my research collaborators and fellow physicists for all they’ve taught me. Thanks to my family for encouraging my love of rationality. Thanks to my friends for their patience and support. And thanks to those—mentioned or not—who have helped shape my ideas along the way.

Lisa Randall
studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University, where she is Frank J. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science. Her work has made her among the most cited and influential theoretical physicists today, and has been featured in
Discover
, the
Economist
,
Newsweek
,
Scientific American
, and many top-ranked scientific journals. She has been one of
Time
magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” and
Rolling Stone’s
“RS100: Agents of Change,” and her first book,
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions
, was named a
New York Times
Notable Book in 2005. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. When not solving the problems of the universe, Randall can be found rock climbing, skiing, or contributing to art-science connections. Her libretto for
Hypermusic Prologue
premiered at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2009.

www.harpercollins.com/lisarandall

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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
Knocking on Heaven’s Door

“Lisa Randall has written
Knocking on Heaven’s Door
in the same witty, informal style with which she explains physics in person, making complex ideas fascinating and easy to understand. Her book presents the latest physics developments with excursions into culture and public policy, explaining science in ways that just might make you think differently—and encourage you to make smarter decisions about the world.”

—
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON

“I didn’t think it was possible to write a complex, detailed look at the world of physics that the non-scientist could understand, but then Lisa Randall wrote this amazing, insightful, and engaging book and proved me wrong.”

—
CARLTON CUSE
, award-winning producer and writer of
Lost

“Science has a battle for hearts and minds on its hands: a battle on two fronts—against superstition and ignorance on one flank, and against pseudo-intellectual obscurantism on the other. How good it feels to have Lisa Randall’s unusual blend of topflight science, clarity, and charm on our side.”

—
RICHARD DAWKINS
, author of
The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion

“A deep and deeply wonderful explanation of how science—and the rest of the known universe—actually works.”

—
DANIEL GILBERT
, author of
Stumbling on Happiness

“Lisa Randall’s focus on the essential relationship between technology and scientific thinking prompts fascinating debate, and this is a great primer for those nonscientists who are trying to figure out the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider.”

—
ELON MUSK
,
CEO/CTO
of SpaceX,
CEO
of Tesla Motors, and co-founder of PayPal

“Many books call to mind superlatives, but this one has them all. It explains the greatest scientific endeavor in history—one that is exploring the earliest, smallest, largest, and most powerful phenomena in the universe, and that may answer the deepest questions about the nature of physical reality. Lisa Randall’s lucid explanations of concepts at the frontiers of physics—including her own dazzling ideas—are highly illuminating, and her hearty defense of reason and science is a welcome contribution to the contemporary world of ideas. Read this book today to understand the science of tomorrow.”

—
STEVEN PINKER
, author of
How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought

“Lisa Randall is the rarest rarity—a theoretical physics genius who can write and talk to the rest of us in ways we both understand and enjoy. This book takes nonspecialists as close as they’ll ever get to the inner workings of the cosmos.”

—
LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS
, former treasury secretary

“Lisa Randall does a great job of explaining to the nonphysicist the basic science approaches of modern physics and what the latest experiments might reveal. This is a must-read to appreciate what is coming in our future.”

—
J. CRAIG VENTER
, sequencer of the human genome and developer of the first synthetic life

Warped Passages

Jacket and cover design by Allison Saltzman

Cover photograph: Carter Dow Photography

KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR
. Copyright © 2011 by Lisa Randall.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Every attempt has been made to contact copyright holders. The author and publisher will be happy to make good in future printings any errors or omissions.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Randall, Lisa.

Knocking on heaven’s door : how physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world / Lisa Randall.—1st ed.

     p. cm.

Summary: “From the one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World”—and bestselling author of Warped Passages—an exhilarating and readable overview of the latest ideas in physics and a rousing defense of the role of science in our lives”—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-06-172372-8

1. Science—Social aspects. 2. Physics—Social aspects. I. Title.

Q175.5.R365 2011

500—dc22

2011010521

EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062096890

11 12 13 14 15
OV
/
RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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1
. I will often approximate this as 27 kilometers.

2
. The Large Hadron Collider is quite big, but it is used to study infinitesimal distances. The reasons for its large size are described later on when we discuss the LHC in detail.

3
. Unlike in the movie, Herman Hupfield’s famous song “As Time Goes By” written in 1931 began with an unmistakable reference to people’s familiarity with the latest physics developments:

This day and age were living in

Gives cause for apprehension,

With speed and new invention,

And things like fourth dimension,

Yet we get a little weary

From Mr. Einstein’s theory

4
. Fielding, Henry.
Tom Jones
. (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1986).

5
. Quantum mechanics can have macroscopic effects in carefully prepared systems or when measurements apply to high statistics situations, or very precise devices so that small effects can emerge. However, that does not invalidate using an approximate classical theory for most ordinary phenomena. It depends on precision as Chapter 12 will further address. The effective theory approach allows for the approximation and makes precise when it is inadequate.

6
. I will sometimes employ exponential notation, which I will use here to explain what I mean in the middle in terms of powers of ten. The size of the universe is 10
²⁷
meters. This number is a one followed by 27 zeroes, or one thousand trillion trillion. The smallest imaginable scale is 10
^-35
meters. This number is a decimal point followed by thirty-four zeroes followed by a one, or one hundredth of one billionth of one trillionth of one trillionth. (You can see why exponential notation is easier.) Our size is about 10
¹
. The exponent here is 1, which is reasonably close to the middle between 27 and -35.

7
. Levenson, Tom.
Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science
(Simon & Schuster, 1994).

8
. During the Inquisition, the Romans didn’t include Tycho’s books in their Index, as would have been expected based on his Lutheran faith, because they wanted his framework to keep the Earth stationary yet consistent with Galileo’s observations.

9
. Hooke, Robert.
An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth from Observations
(1674), quoted in Owen Gingerich,
Truth in Science: Proof, Persuasion, and the Galileo Affair, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
, vol. 55.

10
. Rilke, Rainer Maria.
Duino Elegies
(1922).

11
. Doyle, Arthur Conan.
The Sign of the Four
(originally published in 1890 in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, chapter 1), in which Sherlock Holmes comments on Watson’s pamphlet, “A Study in Scarlet.”

12
. Browne, Sir Thomas.
Religio Medici
(1643, pt. 1, section 9).

13
. Augustine.
The Literal Meaning of Genesis
, vol. 1, books 1–6, trans. and ed. by John Hammond Taylor, S. J. (New York: Newman Press, 1982). Book 1, chapter 19, 38, pp. 42–43.

14
. Augustine.
On Christian Doctrine
, trans. by D. W. Robertson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1958).

15
. Augustine.
Confessions
, trans. by R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).

16
. Stillman, Drake.
Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
(Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957) p. 181.

17
. Ibid., pp. 179–180.

18
. Ibid., p. 186.

19
. Galileo, 1632.
Science & Religion: Opposing Viewpoints
, ed. Janelle Rohr (Greenhaven Press, 1988), p. 21.

20
. See, for exmple, Gopnik, Alison.
The Philosophical Baby
(Picador, 2010).