by Adam Frank
26. Helge S. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos: From Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 68.
27. Ibid., 67–66.
28. Robert Rynasiewicz, “Newton’s Views on Space, Time, and Motion,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2008 ed., http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/newton-stm/ (accessed October 20, 2010).
29. Samuel L. Macey, Encyclopedia of Time (New York: Garland, 1994), 426.
30. Karl Popper, The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 1998), 123; J. Hadamard, “Newton and the Infinitesimal Calculus,” in Newton Tercentenary Celebrations (Cambridge: The Royal Society, 1947), 123.
31. Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker, 1995), 11.
32. For a guide to modern sextant use see Richard K. Hubbard, Boater’s Bowditch: The Small-Craft American Practical Navigator (Camden, ME: International Marine/McGraw-Hill, 2000), 157.
33. Derek Howse, Greenwich Time and Longitude (London: Philip Wilson, 1997), 75.
34. Harrison’s work on the chronometer was in quest of the so-called Longitude Prize. In 1714 the British government offered £20,000 as a prize for a solution to the longitude problem. Provide a longitude measurement system that was good to within half a degree (two minutes of time) and the prize could be claimed. Many inventors tried, and many inventors failed, including many of the age’s scientific luminaries.
35. Howse, Greenwich Time and Longitude, 75.
36. Ibid.
37. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 76.
38. Ibid.
39. M. A. Hoskin, “Newton, Providence and the Universe of Stars,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 8 (1977): 79.
40. Helge S. Kragh, “Cosmology and the Entropic Creation Argument,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 37, no. 2 (2007): 371.
41. Ibid.
42. Edward Harrison, Cosmology: The Science of the Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 74.
43. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 82.
44. Roger Hahn, “Laplace and the Mechanistic Universe,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 256.
45. Rodney Carlisle, Scientific American: Inventions and Discoveries (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004), 209.
46. Arthur Haberman, The Making of the Modern Age (Toronto: Gage, 1984).
47. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 103.
48. A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 3.
49. Ibid., xxxi.
50. Ibid., 15.
51. Ibid., 328.
52. Wax and spermaceti candles were particularly expensive. In 1765, Horace Walpole estimated that it cost the marquis de la Borde, a wealthy Parisian financier, more than 28,000 livres to heat and light his palatial home. Ibid., 103.
53. Ibid., 300.
54. Ibid., 302.
55. Ibid., 334.
56. Ibid., 93.
57. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 93.
58. Ibid., 110.
59. Ibid., 111–13.
60. Ibid., 115.
61. Ibid., 34.
62. Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 333.
63. Russell Leigh Sharman and Cheryl Harris Sharman, Nightshift NYC (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 113.
64. Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 58.
65. Ibid., 65.
66. Ibid., 70.
67. Ibid., 71.
68. Sharman and Sharman, Nightshift NYC, 113.
69. The true nature of the connection between time and entropy flow is debated to this day, though there remains general agreement that they are somehow intertwined. (The phrase “arrow of time” was not coined until 1927 by Arthur Eddington.)
70. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 102.
71. Rudolf Clausius, “On the Second Fundamental Theorem of the Mechanical Theory of Heat,” London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 35, no. 239 (June 1868): 419.
72. In fact, Darwin and Lyell corresponded heatedly on the nature of evolution. Darwin was well versed in Lyell’s writings and may have seen himself as the heir to Lyell’s uniformitarianism. David N. Stamos, Darwin and the Nature of Species (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 54.
73. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 102.
74. Report of the Annual Meeting of the British Society for the Advancement of Science (London: Taylor and Francis, 1872).
75. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 106.
CHAPTER 5: THE TELEGRAPH, THE ELECTRIC CLOCK AND THE BLOCK UNIVERSE
1. Traveler’s Official Railway Guide for the United States and Canada, vol. 11 (New York: National Railway Publication Co., 1881), 108.
2. Donald McCloskey, “The Industrial Revolution 1780–1860: A Survey,” in The Economics of the Industrial Revolution, ed. Joel Mokyr (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1985), 58.
3. In 1865, the United States was already crisscrossed with telephone lines. Western Union boasted 44,000 miles of telegraph lines, the American Telegraph Company had 23,000 miles and the United States Telegraph Company had 16,000 miles. Richard Allen Schwarzlose, The Nation’s Newsbrokers, vol. 2: The Rush to Institution, from 1865 to 1920 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 10.
4. The “flying machine,” operating during the 1770s, was advertised as a miracle of speed because it covered the 100 miles between New York City and Philadelphia in only two days. The website MapQuest says that a trip from New York City to Philadelphia today would take 2 hours. John Thomas Scharf, A History of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: J. H. Everts, 1884), 3:2159.
5. Express trains would make the trip in about three hours. With stops the trip would be closer to four hours. Emory Edwards, Modern American Locomotive Engines, Their Design Construction and Management: A Practical Work for Practical Men (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1895), 130.
6. The Pennsylvania Railroad ran on Philadelphia time, which was five minutes slower than New York time and five minutes faster than Baltimore time. Carlton J. Corliss, The Day of Two Noons, 6th ed. (Washington, DC: Association of American Railroads, 1952), 2. Some cities, such as Albany and Buffalo had local times more than twenty minutes apart on the same rail. Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 22.
7. Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 125.
8. For example, by 1874, the Pennsylvania Railway operated on the times of Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio. Bartky, Selling the True Time, 244.
9. Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, 126.
10. Ibid., 99.
11. Ibid., 116.
12. Ibid., 122.
13. Ibid., 123.
14. Ibid., 127.
15. In 1881 the trip from Florida to New York could be made in about sixteen hours. Traveler’s Official Railway Guide for the United States and Canada, 321.
16. Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, 136.
17. Ibid., 141.
18. Ibid., 144.
19. Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 114.
20. The experiment used crossed beams of light that would be brought together and compared after they had moved against, with or perpendicular to the aether. By comparing shifts in the relative position of the light wave peaks, the experimenters could look for shifts in the speed of light due to motion with respect to the aether. This process is called interferome
try.
21. Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, 261–62.
22. Ibid., 258.
23. Ibid., 253.
24. Ibid., 262.
25. Ibid., 265.
26. The title in English translation is “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity,” published in Annalen der Physik (1916). Alice Calaprice and Trevor Lipscombe, Albert Einstein: A Biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 70.
27. Ibid., 67.
28. Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, 29.
29. Ibid., 34.
30. Ibid., 325.
31. Ibid., 312.
32. Ibid., 327–28.
CHAPTER 6: THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE, RADIO HOURS AND WASHING MACHINE TIME
1. Susan Strasser, Never Done (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 105.
2. Elaine Landau, The History of Everyday Life (Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2006), 26.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 26–27.
5. Carolyn Dever, Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 133.
6. Strasser, Never Done, 79.
7. David J. Cole, Eve Browning and Fred E. H. Schroeder, Encyclopedia of Modern Everyday Inventions (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), 171.
8. Ibid., 11.
9. Peter Marber, Seeing the Elephant: Understanding Globalization from Trunk to Tail (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2009), 100.
10. David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States 1920–1939: Decades of Promise and Pain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 56.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 55, 202.
13. Loretta Lorance, “Promise, Promises: The Allure of Household Appliances in the 1920s,” Part, Spring 1998, http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/arthi/part/part2-3/house.html.
14. Some stars put out more energy per second than others. Thus a star that appears bright in the sky might be of inherently low energy output but just be closer to us than stars that are putting out more energy but are farther away. Bradley W. Carroll and Dale A. Ostlie, An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics (New York: Pearson, 2007).
15. Allen Sandage et al., Centennial History of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, vol. 1: The Mt. Wilson Observatory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
16. Helge S. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos: From Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
17. Ibid., 110.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 80.
20. Ibid., 118.
21. Ibid., 117.
22. Ibid., 118.
23. Martin Gorst, Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 215.
24. A fellow Rhodes Scholar, Jakob Larsen, wrote of Hubble, “We laughed at his effort to acquire an extreme English pronunciation. . . . We always claimed that he could not be consistent, so that he might take a bäth in a b[ă]th tub.” Gale E. Christianson, Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 65.
25. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 119.
26. Ibid., 115.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 119.
29. Gorst, Measuring Eternity, 221.
30. Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical Development of Two Theories of the Universe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 7.
31. Astronomer Hugo von Seeliger had shown just two decades before that an infinite universe with constant density could not be brought into agreement with Newton’s law. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 109.
32. D. Neuenschwander, “History of Big Bang Cosmology, Part 3: The De Sitter Universe and Redshifts,” Radiations Magazine (Fall 2008): 26.
33. Gorst, Measuring Eternity.
34. Neuenschwander, “History of Big Bang Cosmology,” 27.
35. John North, God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time (New York: Continuum, 2006).
36. The exact quote is “We wonder why we should be shunned as though our system were a plague spot in the universe.” Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Expanding Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1933).
37. Gorst, Measuring Eternity.
38. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 140.
39. Gorst, Measuring Eternity, 227.
40. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 141.
41. Gorst, Measuring Eternity, 233.
42. Joseph Cambray and David H. Rosen, Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 18.
43. Anthony J. Rudel, Hello, Everybody! The Dawn of American Radio (New York: Harcourt, 2008), 94–95.
44. Ibid.
45. For a detailed breakdown of NBC in its earliest phases see Christopher H. Sterling, “Blue Network,” in Encyclopedia of Radio (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004).
46. Manuel G. Doncel, “On Hertz’s Conceptual Conversion: From Wire Waves to Air Waves,” in Heinrich Hertz: Classical Physicist, Modern Philosopher, ed. Davis Baird, R. I. G. Hughes and Alfred Nordman (Hingham, MA: Kluwer Academic, 1998), 73.
47. Rudel, Hello, Everybody, 13.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991), 89.
51. Rudel, Hello, Everybody, 28.
52. Ibid., 31.
53. Ibid., 33.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 65.
57. Ibid., 66.
58. Ibid., 83.
59. R. Alton Lee, The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 97.
60. Rudel, Hello, Everybody, 209.
61. Christopher H. Sterling, “Amos ’n’ Andy,” in Encyclopedia of Radio (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 125–26.
62. Rudel, Hello, Everybody.
63. Ibid.
64. Luther F. Sies, Encyclopedia of American Radio, 1920–1960, 2nd ed. (New York: McFarland, 2008), 1:607.
65. Rudel, Hello, Everybody.
66. Ibid.
CHAPTER 7: THE BIG BANG, TELSTAR AND A NEW ARMAGEDDON
1. For a detailed account of the Castle Bravo shot see Richard Lee Miller, Under the Cloud: The Decade of Nuclear Testing (The Woodlands, TX: Two Sixty, 1991).
2. Ibid., 188–92.
3. Ibid. The fallout from the Castle Bravo test eventually covered a 7,000-square-mile area of the Pacific. See also U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 7.
4. The blast was expected to reach a height of twenty-five miles, then “safely” scatter radioactive particulates over hundreds of miles. However, radiation levels in the immediate vicinity (the control bunker at Enyu, twenty miles away) rose to dangerous levels at an alarming rate, trapping researchers and enlisted men in the bunker until radiation levels were low enough for the men to be extracted. Miller, Under the Cloud, 191, 193.
5. Peter J. Coughtry, “Report of the Scientific Secretary,” Paper presented at the Nato Advanced Research Workshop: Nuclear Tests: Long-term Consequences in the Semipalatinski/Altai Region, Barnaul, Russia, September 5–10, 1994, 1998.
6. Jonathan I. Katz, The Biggest Bangs: The Mystery of Gamma-Ray Bursts, the Most Violent Explosions in the Universe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 35.
7. Edward L. Wolf, Nanophysics and Nanotechnology: An Introduction to Modern Concepts in Nanoscience, 2nd ed. (Moerlenbach: Wiley VCH, 2006), 3.
8. A detailed history of quantum mechanics along with a history of the atomic bomb can be found in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).
9. Heisenberg was speaking to our inability to conceptualize the atom given our present language and conceptual vocabulary that deals with phenomena on an everyday, human scale. James D. Stein, How Math Explains the World: A Guide to the Power of Numbers, from Car Repair to Modern Phys
ics (New York: HarperCollins/Smithsonian Books, 2008), 57.
10. Mark P. Silverman, Quantum Superposition: Counterintuitive Consequences of Coherence, Entanglement, and Interference (Berlin: Springer, 2008), vii.
11. Victor Mansfield, Synchronicity, Science and Soul-Making: Understanding Jungian Synchronicity (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2001), 32.
12. Carsten Reinhardt, Chemical Sciences in the 20th Century: Bridging Boundaries (Moerlenbach: Wiley VCH, 2001).
13. Eddington’s reluctance to broach a scientific narrative of the beginning may have been due in part to his private beliefs. He was a Quaker by upbringing. While not a Christian apologist, Eddington warned against intermingling the scientific and spiritual realms: “I repudiate the idea of proving the distinctive beliefs of religion either from the data of physical science or by the methods of physical science.” Larry Witham, Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science and Religion (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), ix.
14. Helge S. Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical Development of Two Theories of the Universe, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 46.
15. Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Padstow, Cornwall: Blackwell, 1995), 136.
16. Gerald James Holton and Stephen G. Brush, Physics, the Human Adventure: From Copernicus to Einstein and Beyond (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 497.
17. Georges Lemaître, “L’Univers en expansion,” Ann Soc Sci Bruxelles A 21 (1933): 51–85.
18. J. S. Plastkett, “The Expansion of the Universe,” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 27, no. 35 (1933): 252.
19. Helge S. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos: From Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 157.
20. Eddington, The Expanding Universe, 125.
21. Mark S. Madsen, The Dynamic Cosmos: Exploring the Physical Evolution of the Universe (Cornwall: CRC, 1995), 6.
22. Étienne Klein and Marc Lachièze-Rey liken opposition to Lemaître’s big bang to the Catholic Church’s opposition to cosmologies emerging in the sixteenth century in that the idea of the expanding universe “clashed with the centuries-old doctrine of a changeless universe.” Étienne Klein and Marc Lachièze-Rey, The Quest for Unity: The Adventure of Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
23. Paul Halpern, Countdown to Apocalypse: A Scientific Exploration of the End of the World (New York: Perseus, 1998), 11.
