David Kaiser is writing two books about gravity: a textbook on cosmology, and a history of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Twenty years ago, the science writer Dennis Overbye published a marvellous book, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, in which he traced the development of cosmology – the scientific study of the universe as a whole – during the second half of the 20th century. The cosmologists in Overbye’s book were lonely for two reasons. They included the last remnants of a generation of...
Particle physics is at once the most elegant and brutish of sciences. Elegant because of its sweeping symmetries and exquisite mathematical structures. Brutish because the principal means of acquiring information about the subatomic realm is revving up tiny bits of matter to extraordinary energies and then smashing them together. Imagine trying to discern the hidden inner workings of a...
One of the T-shirts you’ll see quite often around MIT says: ‘Speed limit: 186,000 miles per second. It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law.’ The speed in question is the speed of light, and the law comes from Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Relativity is predicated on the notion that the speed of light is unsurpassable, and most of modern physics is predicated on relativity. So this morning’s announcement that a team of physicists at CERN may have measured tiny particles, known as neutrinos, travelling faster than light has the potential to eclipse all other news that ever has or may yet come out of CERN – Higgs particles, supersymmetry and all else combined. The key word, though, is ‘potential’. By the physicists’ own reckoning, their results require a lot more scrutiny before anyone concludes that physics has one fewer leg to stand on.
I wasn't the only person in the United States who counted an extra reason to enjoy the parades and festivities this week. The announcement at CERN that two independent experimental groups had each collected convincing evidence that the long-sought Higgs particle had been found prompted the physicist and blogger Matthew Strassler to declare 4 July ‘IndependHiggs Day’. I couldn't imagine a better reason for fireworks.
A decade ago, digging through a physicist’s archive, I stumbled on a document that has haunted me ever since: a hand-typed table of integrals seemingly little different from the ones I’d kept by me as a student. The familiarity of the contents jarred with the table’s front page. Only 31 copies of the table had been printed, the recipients listed on the cover. The table,...
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