The Universe Within (11 page)

The School of Athens
by Raphael. Plato (left) and Aristotle (right) stand in the central arch. Seated at front centre, thinking and writing, is Heraclitus. To the left of him are Parmenides, Hypatia, Pythagoras, and Anaximander. At front right, using a compass, is Euclid.
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The 1927 Fifth International Solvay Conference, held at the height of the quantum revolution which overturned the classical world-view.
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The double-slit experiment. A laser (top) shines light of a single wavelength on two slits in a partition (middle). The light waves from each slit spread out and interfere, producing a pattern of stripes on the screen (bottom).
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Emergence of a region of the universe from the big bang.
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The temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation, measured across the sky by the Differential Microwave Radiometer on
nasa'
s
cobe
satellite. Hotter is red, colder is blue. At top left is the original picture, showing the asymmetry due to Earth's motion. Removing the effect of the motion produces the picture at lower left, showing the Milky Way as a band across the middle. Removing the galaxy's emission produces the picture at right, showing the primordial density variations in the universe.
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The cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2218, two billion light years
away from us. The stretched-out “arcs” of light are the images of galaxies behind the cluster, lensed and distorted by the cluster's gravitational field. The distortion can be used to measure the distribution of mass within the cluster, revealing the existence of a substantial quantity of “dark matter” in addition to the visible galaxies, stars, and hot gas.
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The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town, South Africa.
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A group of
aims
students at the 2008 launch of the Next Einstein
Initiative, a plan to create fifteen
aims
centres across Africa within a decade. The two men in suits are Michael Griffin (left), head of
nasa
, and Mosibudi Mangena (right), the South African Minister for Science and Technology at the time. The woman in the head scarf at the picture's centre is Esra, from Sudan. The man at front right is Yves, from Cameroon.
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The formula that summarizes all the known laws of physics.
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The
atlas
detector at the Large Hadron Collider at
cern
in Geneva, Switzerland
. This giant apparatus (notice the person standing on the platform) is used to detect and analyze the spray of particles produced by the collision of two particle beams at its centre.
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