About Time

by Adam Frank

  24. Citing an atomic weapon’s power in equivalent TNT is misleading, as it does not embrace the new killing physics of radiation inherent to an atomic bomb. The neutrons, gamma rays and beta particles released during a nuclear explosion have the right mean free path to cause maximum damage to living tissue. For an in-depth study of the deleterious effects of nuclear explosions, see Leo Sartori, “Effects of Nuclear Weapons,” in Physics and Nuclear Arms Today: Readings from Physics Today, ed. David Hafemeister (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1991), 2.

  25. America in the 20th Century: 1940–1949, 2nd ed. (Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 2003), 640.

  26. Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 497.

  27. “Harold Agnew on: The ‘Mike’ Test,” American Experience, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/filmmore/reference/interview/agnewmiketest.html (accessed February 11, 2011).

  28. Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force: 1907–1960 (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2002), 1:513.

  29. Ibid., 202.

  30. Eric A. Croddy and James J. Wirtz, eds., Weapons of Mass Destruction: An Encyclopedia of Worldwide Policy, Technology and History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 26.

  31. Marianne J. Dyson, Space and Astronomy: Decade by Decade (New York: Facts on File, 2007), 122–23.

  32. Roger Handberg, Seeking New World Vistas: The Militarization of Space (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 77.

  33. Stephen Weiner, “Systems and Technology,” in Ballistic Missile Defence, eds. Ashton B. Carter and David N. Schwartz (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1984), 51–52.

  34. For a complete breakdown of nuclear weapons by country and year, see Robert Norris, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2006,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 62, no. 4 (July–Aug, 2006): 66.

  35. John H. Barton and Lawrence D. Weiler, eds., International Arms Control: Issues and Agreements (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 56.

  36. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 178.

  37. These are the most abundant isotopes of the elements listed.

  38. Joseph A. Angelo Jr., “Gamow, George,” in Encyclopedia of Space and Astronomy (New York: Facts on File, 2006), 257.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 178.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Deborah Todd and Joseph A. Angelo Jr., A to Z of Scientists in Space and Astronomy (New York: Facts on File, 2005), 10.

  43. Later versions would push this start time earlier. See R. Alpher and R. Herman, “Remarks on the Evolution of the Expanding Universe,” Physical Review, 75 (1949): 1089–99, and Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 183.

  44. George Gamow, Creation of the Universe (New York: Viking Press, 1952), 62.

  45. Mauro D’Onofrio and Carlo Burgiana, eds., Questions of Modern Cosmology: Galileo’s Legacy (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2009), 48; Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy, 130.

  46. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 183.

  47. Todd and Angelo, A to Z of Scientists in Space and Astronomy, 11.

  48. Rikky Rooksby, Inside Classic Rock Tracks: Songwriting and Recording Secrets of 100 Great Songs from 1960 to the Present Day (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2001), 21–22.

  49. Richard Lewis, “Telstar: First with the Most,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: The Magazine of Science and Public Affairs 18, no. 10 (December 1962): 38.

  50. The Thor-Delta rocket was of the same family of rockets as the Thor-Intercontinental (“Thoric”), which was a proposed ICBM. However the project was scrapped in favour of the Atlas and Titan ICBMs. David J. Darling, The Complete Book of Space: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2003), 432–33.

  51. Benjamin F. Shearer et al., eds., Home Front Heroes: A Biographical Dictionary of Americans During Wartime (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 1:231.

  52. David K. van Keuren, “Moon in Their Eyes: Moon Communication Relay at the Naval Research Laboratory, 1951–1962,” in Beyond the Ionosphere: Fifty Years of Satellite Communication, ed. Andrew J. Butrica (Washington, DC: NASA, Office of History, 1997), 9.

  53. Mark Williamson, Spacecraft Technology: The Early Years, 2nd ed. (Bodmin, Cornwall: Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2008), 179.

  54. America’s first satellite, Explorer 1, was launched on January 31, 1958. Matthew A. Bille and Erika Lishock, The First Space Race: Launching the World’s First Satellites (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 130.

  55. Donald H. Martin, Communication Satellites, 4th ed. (El Segundo, CA: Aerospace Corporation, 2000), 4, 7, 8.

  56. John Bray, Innovation and the Communications Revolution: From the Victorian Pioneers to Broadband Internet (Bodmin, Cornwall: Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2009), 214.

  57. Khi V. Thai et al., Handbook of Globalization and the Environment (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2007), 104.

  58. Walter Cronkite, “The Day the World Got Smaller,” NPR, July 23, 2002, http://www.npr.org/news/specials/cronkite (accessed February 23, 2001).

  59. James Schwoch, Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946–69 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 1.

  60. Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy, 129.

  61. Corey Powell, God in the Equation: How Einstein Transformed Religion (New York: Free Press, 2003), 169.

  62. Ibid.

  63. Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy, 199.

  64. Ibid., 85.

  65. Simon Mitton, Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle’s Life in Science (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry, 2005), 134.

  66. Martin Gorst, Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 254.

  67. Ken Croswell, The Universe at Midnight: Observation Illuminating the Cosmos (New York: Free Press, 2001), 45.

  68. Mitton, Conflict in the Cosmos, 204.

  CHAPTER 8: INFLATION, MOBILE PHONES AND THE OUTLOOK UNIVERSE

  1. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Boston: Shambhala, 2010), 12.

  2. Steve Lohr, “Is Information Overload a 650 Billion Dollar Drag on the Economy?” New York Times, December 20, 2007, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/is-information-overload-a-650-billion-drag-on-the-economy (accessed December 29, 2010).

  3. Michael B. Schiffer, Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity Before Edison (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 144.

  4. Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 181.

  5. Todd Campbell, “The First Email Message: Who Sent It and What It Said,” Pretext (March 1998).

  6. Ibid.

  7. Claire Hewson et al., Internet Research Methods: A Practical Guide for the Social and Behavioural Sciences (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), 4.

  8. Tom Van Vleck, “The History of Electronic Mail,” http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html (accessed February 24, 2011).

  9. Tomlinson did not invent file transfer as a concept or the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) widely in use today. Rather, his experimental protocol CPYNET was instrumental to the file transfer protocol that became e-mail. Campbell, “The First Email Message.”

  10. Ibid.

  11. Patrice Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 46.

  12. Gerard O’Regan, A Brief History of Computing (London: Springer, 1998), 188.

  13. Thomas Streeter, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 126.

  14. See Mark Fischetti and Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), 68.

  15. Lelia Green, The Internet: An Introduction to New Media (New York: Berg, 2010), 33.

  16. Catherine C. Marshall, “How People Manage Information over a Lifetime,” in Personal Information Ma
nagement, ed. William P. Jones and Jaime Teevan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 70.

  17. Since the speed of light is an upper bound on motion, all accelerators bring their particles to velocities very close to c. Bigger accelerators add lots more energy to the particles, which, however, only increases their actual velocity by a small amount.

  18. Richard Feynman, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman, ed. Michelle Feynman (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 100.

  19. Bogdan Pohv et al., Particles and Nuclei: An Introduction to the Physical Concepts, trans. Martin Lavelle, 6th ed. (Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2008), 3.

  20. Peter Coles, The Routledge Companion to the New Cosmology (New York: Routledge, 2001), 66.

  21. If omega begins larger than 1, it remains larger than one 1 forever. If it begins less than one 1, then it remains so forever.

  22. Helge S. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos: From Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 233.

  23. See Alan Guth and Paul J. Steinhardt, “The Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American 250 (1984): 90.

  24. Steven Soter and Neil de Grasse Tyson, eds., Cosmic Horizons: Astronomy at the Cutting Edge (New York: New Press, 2000).

  25. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, 213.

  26. Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker, 1995), 16.

  27. Nel Samama, Global Positioning: Technologies and Performance (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2008), 21.

  28. William Lowrie, Fundamentals of Geophysics, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 70.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Ibid. The system comprises twenty-four satellites such that five to eight are visible at any given time.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Ibid. A series of satellite-based measurements in 1989 and 1993 in Greece found that southwestern Greece moved to the southwest on the order of 20–40 mm per year.

  33. Claude Audoin and Bernard Guinot, The Measurement of Time: Time, Frequency, and the Atomic Clock (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 99; Tom Logsdon, Understanding the Navstar: GPS, GIS, and IVHS, 2nd ed. (New York: Chapman & Hall, 1992), 166.

  34. Tony Jones, Splitting the Second: The Story of Atomic Time (Philadelphia: Institute of Physics, 2001), 136.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Richard Pogge, “Real-World Relativity: The GPS Navigation System,” http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html (accessed February 18, 2011).

  37. Mary Pat Kelly, “Good to Go”: The Rescue of Capt. Scott O’Grady, USAF, from Bosnia (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1996), 135.

  38. Anne G. K. Solomon, “The Global Positioning System,” in Triumphs and Tragedies of the Modern Presidency: Seventy-Six Case Studies in Presidential Leadership, ed. David Abshire (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 108.

  39. Mohinder S. Grewal et al., Global Positioning Systems, Inertial Navigation, and Integration, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2007), 144.

  40. Woodrow Barfield and Thomas Caudell, Fundamentals of Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001), 374.

  41. Richard Raysman, Emerging Technologies and the Law: Forms and Analysis (New York: Law Journal Press, 2003), 1–24.

  42. Martin Gorst, Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 281.

  43. Ibid., 282.

  44. Marcelo Gleiser, A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe (New York: Free Press, 2010), 96.

  45. S. Alan Stern, Our Universe: The Thrill of Extragalactic Exploration as Told by Leading Experts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 51.

  46. Peter Coles and Francesco Lucchin, Cosmology: The Origin and Evolution of Cosmic Structure, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2003), 263.

  47. Marcelo Gleiser, The Prophet and the Astronomer: A Scientific Journey to the End of Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 282.

  CHAPTER 9: WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS

  1. Cyclical cosmology is common in orthodox stoic thought. Universes end in complete, devastating conflagration. Chrysippus argues that conflagration did not involve substantial change, let alone all-consuming fire. Ricardo Salles describes Chrysippus’ cycles: “The initial and final fire of any cosmic cycle is nothing but god himself in a completely undifferentiated state.” Ricardo Salles, “Introduction: God and Cosmos in Stoicism,” in God and Cosmos in Stoicism, ed. Ricardo Salles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–4.

  2. Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 175.

  3. Helge S. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos: From Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 147.

  4. R. H. Dicke and P. J. E. Peebles, “The Big Bang Cosmology—Enigmas and Nostrums,” in General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, ed. Stephen Hawking and W. Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 511.

  5. Charles Misner et al., Gravitation (New York: Freeman, 1973), 805.

  6. Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).

  7. Misner et al., Gravitation, 11.

  8. See Lee Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

  9. Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe, 124.

  10. Ibid., 125, 129.

  11. A nontechnical description is in Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 206. A hypertechnical description can be found in Joseph Polchinski, String Theory: An Introduction to the Bosonic String (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1:6.

  12. In what follows I am taking the description from Steinhart and Turok, Endless Universe. For original papers on the subject, see Justin Khoury et al., “The Ekpyrotic Universe: Colliding Branes and the Origin of the Hot Big Bang,” Physical Review D 64, no. 12 (November 28, 2001), and Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, “The Cyclic Model Simplified,” New Astronomy Reviews 49, no. 2–6 (2005): 43–57.

  13. Andreas Albrecht and Neil Turok, “Evolution of Cosmic Strings,” Physical Review Letters 54 (1985): 1868; Alan Guth and Paul J. Steinhardt, “The Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American 250 (1984): 90.

  14. Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe, 148.

  15. Ibid., 189.

  16. I am using the term ekpyrotic cyclic model to distinguish it from other new versions of cyclic cosmology.

  17. Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe, 197.

  18. See Clifford M. Will, Was Einstein Right?: Putting General Relativity to the Test (New York: Perseus, 1984), 181, for a description of gravity waves and pulsars.

  19. I have slightly modified this version of the story from these sources: Heinrich Robert Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, ed. Joseph Campbell, 2nd ed. (New York: Bollingen, 1974), 3, and David Adams Leeming, The World of Myth: An Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

  20. Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007).

  21. Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (New York: Hachette, 2005).

  22. Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.

  23. Martin Bojowald, Once Before Time: A Whole Story of the Universe (New York: Random House, 2010).

  24. Paul H. Frampton, Did Time Begin? Will Time End? Maybe the Big Bang Never Occurred (Singapore: World Scientific, 2009).

  25. Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).

  CHAPTER 10: EVER-CHANGING ETERNITIES

&n
bsp; 1. Hoyle’s lectures were broadcast on Saturdays during the “snowbound” months of January and February 1950. In the absence of an exact date for this particular broadcast I have chosen February 4, 1950, a Saturday. Jane Gregory, Fred Hoyle’s Universe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 47, 48.

  2. For a more complete description, see Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (New York: Basic Books, 1998).

  3. Readers who want more information should see Sean Carroll’s wonderful book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (New York: Penguin, 2010).

  4. Ibid.

  5. See Guth, The Inflationary Universe; Alan Guth and Paul J. Steinhardt, “The Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American 250 (1984): 90.

  6. Carroll, From Eternity to Here.

  7. See Paul C. W. Davies, “John Archibald Wheeler and the Clash of Ideas,” in Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology, and Complexity, ed. John D. Barrow, Paul C. W. Davies, and Charles L. Harper Jr. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20.

  8. Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 170.

  9. Quotes from Carroll come from an interview with the author.

  10. Some parts of this article appeared in a story I wrote for Discover: “3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang,” April 2008.

  11. See Carroll, From Eternity to Here, 357.

  12. Davies, “John Archibald Wheeler and the Clash of Ideas.”

  13. Gregory, Fred Hoyle’s Universe.

  14. Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (New York: Hachette, 2005), 79.

  15. Davies, “John Archibald Wheeler and the Clash of Ideas,” xv.

  16. Susskind, Cosmic Landscape.

  CHAPTER 11: GIVING UP THE GHOST

  1. This account comes from an interview with Julian Barbour on September 17, 2010.

  2. Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  3. Parts of this chapter first appeared in my articles “3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang” and “Is the Search for Immutable Laws of Nature a Wild-Goose Chase?”, Discover (April 2010).