by Harry Cliff
600g cooking apples
Juice of a lemon
50g light brown sugar plus 1 Tbsp. for sprinkling
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
2 tbsp. cornstarch
For finishing
1 free-range egg beaten, for glazing
1 or 2 tbsp. demerara or light brown sugar
Now make the apple pie:
First make the pastry. Place the flour, sugar, salt, and lemon zest into a bowl and rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add the beaten egg and water and stir with a round-bladed knife until the mixture forms a dough. Alternatively, put the dry ingredients in a food processor, briefly whizz to combine, then add the beaten egg and water and whizz till the pastry balls.
Wrap the pastry in plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.
Remove the pastry from the fridge, returning one-third for the lid. Roll out the remaining pastry on a lightly floured surface to ¹/₈-inch thick and 2 to 3 inches larger than the pie dish. Lift the pastry over a floured rolling pin and lower it gently into the pie dish.
Press the pastry firmly into the dish and up and over the sides, leaving an overhang, making sure there are no air bubbles. Chill in the fridge for 10 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 400°F and place a baking tray in the oven to preheat.
To make the filling, peel, core, and slice the apples and place in a bowl of cold water with the juice of the lemon. Drain and pat dry.
Mix the sugar, cinnamon, and cornstarch in a large bowl, then add the sliced apples and stir. Place the apple filling into the pie dish, leveling the slices but making sure that it rises above the edge of the dish. Brush the rim of the pastry with beaten egg.
Roll out the remaining ball of pastry. Cover the pie with the pastry and press the edges together firmly to seal. Using a sharp knife, trim off the excess pastry, then gently crimp all around the edge. Make a few small holes in the center of the pie with the tip of a knife. Glaze the pie with beaten egg.
To decorate, lightly knead the pastry trimmings and roll out. Cut out some pretty shapes (leaves are traditional, but atoms and stars are also acceptable) and place on top of the pie, glazing with more egg. Chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.
Sprinkle the pie with sugar and bake in the center of the oven for 45–55 minutes until the pastry is golden brown and the apples are tender.
Serve with cream or vanilla ice cream. Warning: filling is hot.
Acknowledgments
As I sit here in September 2020, I cannot quite believe that this book, or at least the words that will eventually go into it, are finally written. That I’ve gotten to this point is almost entirely thanks to the generosity, encouragement, patience, expertise, insight, advice, and occasional sharp shoves from dozens and dozens of people.
I am enormously grateful to the many scientists who gave their time so generously to talk to me, show me around their extraordinary workplaces, introduce me to their colleagues, or review parts of the manuscript, in particular: Gianpaolo Bellini, Aldo Ianni, Matthias Junker, Jennifer Johnson, Matt Kenzie, Sarah Williams, Jeffrey Hangst, Nick Manton, Joe Giaime, Karen Kinemuchi, Helen Caines, Zhangbu Xu, Lijuan Ruan, Juan Maldacena, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Joseph Conlon, Sabine Hossenfelder, Isabel Rabey, Sidney Wright, Panos Charitos, John Ellis, Sean Carroll, Günther Dissertori, and Michael Benedikt. I’d particularly like to thank David Tong and Ben Allanach for reviewing the later chapters and for gently correcting me on some of the more difficult theory bits. The book has far fewer errors thanks to them, though of course any remaining mistakes are mine. And while I’ve only been able to mention a few people specifically, I also owe an unquantifiable debt to my 1,400 colleagues on the LHCb experiment, as well as to the tens of thousands of people in the global scientific community and to the billions of taxpayers all over the world who fund basic, curiosity-driven research. Without them there would have been nothing to write about in the first place.
Special thanks to Graham Farmelo for his sage advice about the process of writing a book, getting me access to the hallowed halls of high theory, and for his warm encouragement. Thanks also to Neil Todd for a wonderful day as he guided me around Rutherford’s old lab in Manchester.
I’m grateful to the excellent staff at the Rayleigh Library at the Cavendish Laboratory and the Science Museum Dana Research Centre and Library, particularly to the always kind and helpful Prabha Shah. Thanks also to my high school physics teacher John Ward, both for inspiring and putting up with me as a teenager and for arranging the loan of a microscope, with the kind approval and help of Caroline Marwood.
This book would not have been possible without the support and forbearance of my boss, Val Gibson, who has been unfailingly encouraging throughout my career in physics and to whom I owe a huge debt. Thank you, Val. I’m also really grateful to my colleagues at the Science Museum, particularly Ali Boyle, from whom I learned a huge amount about how to communicate science and its history, and who gave me so many great opportunities to get better at it.
I would like to thank my brilliant agent Simon Trewin, who helped me turn what had been a very long-gestating idea into something worth writing and made this whole thing possible in the first place. Huge thanks also to Dorian Karchmar at WME in New York for doing such a fantastic job persuading U.S. publishers to talk to a British guy about apple pie, and also to the team at WME in London, especially James Munro, Florence Dodd, and Anna Dixon.
Thank you to my editors, Ravi Mirchandani at Picador and Yaniv Soha at Doubleday. In particular, thanks to Ravi for so enthusiastically backing the arguably rather silly concept from the outset, and to Yaniv for his thoughtful and insightful feedback, which unquestionably resulted in a far better book. Thanks also to Mel Northover for turning my crappy diagrams into something far more appealing and to Amy Ryan for her forensic copyedit and for catching lots of my silly mistakes.
Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family for their love and support over the past eighteen months. To Suzie, thank you for all the mutual book-writing counseling sessions—you helped make the process feel much less lonely. I owe a special debt to my sister, Alexandra, who first suggested that perhaps I should think about writing a book almost a decade ago, a suggestion that ultimately led here. And very last but by absolutely no means least I want to thank my parents, Vicky and Robert, not only for reading and commenting on every last word of this manuscript, but for always being available when I needed to bounce ideas around, have a moan, or just needed a cup of tea and a chat. Thank you for always encouraging me to be curious; this is all your fault.
Notes
PROLOGUE
10000 metric tons of liquid nitrogen: CERN, “Cryogenics: Low temperatures, high performance,” home.cern.
“sinister” dimension: Jon Austin, “What is CERN doing? Bizarre clouds over Large Hadron Collider prove portals are opening,” Daily Express, June 29, 2016, www.express.co.uk.
“to summon God”: Sean Martin, “Large Hadron Collider could accidentally SUMMON GOD, warn conspiracy theorists,” Daily Express, October 5, 2018, www.express.co.uk.
more than €12 billion: Alex Knapp, “How much does it cost to find a Higgs boson?,” Forbes, July 5, 2012, www.forbes.com.
750-meter stretch of the accelerator: Lucio Rossi, “Superconductivity: Its role, its success and its setbacks in the Large Hadron Collider of CERN,” Superconductor Science and Technology 23 (2010): 034001 (17 pages).
“the mind of God”: Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (Bantam Books, 1988), page 175.
CHAPTER 1
“I do not think I shall die”: Holmes, page 257.
“a revolution of physics and chemistry”: Brock, page 104.
“The feeling of it”: Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, vol. 2 (London, 1775).
“to be a guinea
pig”: Brock, page 108.
CHAPTER 2
“produce the most important”: Thackray, page 85.
“He sits at the back”: Gribbin, page 7.
“It is to be hoped”: Albert Einstein, Investigations on the theory of the Brownian movement, translated from original 1905 article by A. D. Cowper (Dover Publications, 1956), page 18.
CHAPTER 3
notoriously clumsy: Isobel Falconer, “Theory and Experiment in J. J. Thomson’s Work on Gaseous Discharge” (PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, 1985), page 103.
keep his boss from handling: Wilson, page 83.
“pulling their legs”: Thomson, page 341.
“the best glassblower in England”: Eve, page 34.
“By thunder!”: Wilson, page 228.
“His mind was like the bow of a battleship”: Chadwick, AIP interview, session 4.
“exceptional violence”: Fernandez, page 65.
“quite the most incredible”: Fernandez, page 73.
CHAPTER 4
“If, as I have reason to believe”: Wilson, page 405.
“The hydrogen atom”: Wilson, page 394.
“I did quite a number of quite silly”: Chadwick, AIP interview, session 3.
“I just kept on pegging away”: Chadwick, AIP interview, session 3.
“I don’t believe it!”: Hendry, page 45.
CHAPTER 5
the Sun blasts 383 trillion trillion watts: Sun Fact Sheet, NASA, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/sunfact.html.
“We do not argue”: Kragh, page 84.
“I think this was the experiment”: Gamow, page 15.
“buzzing with excitement”: Gamow, page 58.
“were almost ready”: Gamow, page 70.
“As soon as it grew dark”: Iosif B. Khriplovich, “The Eventful Life of Fritz Houtermans,” Physics Today 45, no. 7 (1992): 29.
an impressive 800,000 volts: Cathcart, page 218.
“knew nothing about the interior”: Gamow, page 136.
65,000 times more power: Tassoul, page 137.
1.2 times as heavy as the Sun: Cassé, page 82.
CHAPTER 6
“It’s better to be interesting”: Mitton, in the foreword by Paul Davies, page x.
he burst into Fowler’s office: Mitton, page 207.
He later wrote: Hoyle, page 265.
Hoyle repeatedly descended: Hoyle, page 265.
with an energy of 7.19 MeV: Hoyle, page 266.
a beautiful color-coded version of the periodic table: Jennifer Johnson, “Populating the periodic table: Nucleosynthesis of the elements,” Science 363, no. 6426 (February 1, 2019): 474–78.
French philosopher Auguste Comte: Chown, page 56.
until it reaches a temperature of 100 million degrees: Frebel, page 88.
a sugar-cube-sized lump would weigh around a metric ton: Calculated from “a mean density of about one billion kg/m3” in Frebel, page 92.
CHAPTER 7
“repugnant”: Kragh, 46.
“the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation”: Kragh, page 55.
Gamow’s favorite Washington restaurant, Little Vienna: Alpher, AIP interview, session 1.
“The elements were produced in less time”: Chown, page 10.
“about one atom every century”: Kragh, page 183.
“The most exciting phrase”: Attributed in the “quote of the day” source code of the Fortune computer program, June 1987.
CHAPTER 8
“the most original and wonderful instrument”: C. T. R. Wilson—Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Originally from Nobel Lectures, Physics 1922–1941 (Elsevier Publishing Company, 1965).
“Who ordered that?”: Martin Bartusiak, “Who Ordered the Muon?,” New York Times, September 27, 1987.
“The finder of a new elementary particle”: Willis Lamb, Nobel lecture, December 12, 1955. www.nobelprize.org.
“If I could remember”: Robert L. Weber, More Random Walks in Science (Taylor & Francis, 1982), page 80.
His older brother Ben taught him to read: Gell-Mann, page 12.
“the concrete block model”: Riordan, e-book location 2528.
“we must face the likelihood that quarks are not real”: Riordan, e-book location 2765.
CHAPTER 9
“Heisenberg, how do you know”: Farmelo, page 164.
CHAPTER 11
“That’s total nonsense!”: Ralph P. Hudson, “Reversal of the Parity Conservation Law in Nuclear Physics,” in A Century of Excellence in Measurements, Standards, and Technology. NIST Special Publication 958 (National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2001).
“It doesn’t make a difference”: Richard Feynman, “The Character of Physical Law,” lecture 7, “Seeking New Laws,” Messenger Lectures at Cornell, 1964.
CHAPTER 12
“With these record-shattering”: CERN Press Release, “LHC research program gets underway,” March 30, 2010.
“ARE WE ALL GOING”: Michael Hanlon, “Are we all going to die next Wednesday?,” Daily Mail, September 4, 2008, www.dailymail.co.uk.
“COLLIDER TRIGGERS”: Eben Harrell, “Collider Triggers End-of-World Fears,” Time, September 4, 2008, www.time.com.
“The possible concern”: John R. Ellis et al., “Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions,” Journal of Physics G 35, no. 11 (2008): 115004.
“into hospital”: Pallab Ghosh, “Popular physics theory running out of hiding places,” BBC News website, November 12, 2012, www.bbc.co.uk.
“putting our supersymmetry theory colleagues”: Pallab Ghosh, “Popular physics theory running out of hiding places,” BBC News website, November 12, 2012, www.bbc.co.uk.
“was actually expected”: Pallab Ghosh, “Popular physics theory running out of hiding places,” BBC News website, November 12, 2012, www.bbc.co.uk.
“Supersymmetry is a bit late”: Alok Jha, “One year on from the Higgs boson find, has physics hit the buffers?,” The Guardian, August 6, 2013, www.theguardian.com.
CHAPTER 13
“We think we are beginning”: Weinberg, page ix.
“incomparable beauty”: Letter from Albert Einstein to Heinrich Zangger, Berlin, November 26, 1915. Translated and annotated by Bertram Schwarzschild.
“a lonely old fellow”: Paul Halpern, Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat (Basic Books, 2015), page 167.
CHAPTER 14
around $152 billion: Alex Knapp, “Apollo 11’s 50th Anniversary: The Facts and Figures Behind the $152 Billion Moon Landing,” Forbes, July 20, 2019, www.forbes.com.
as the physicist Andrew Steele: Andrew Steele, “Blue Skies Research,” Scienceogram UK, scienceogram.org.
interstellar Higgs drive: Jon Butterworth, “Impact? I want an interstellar Higgs drive please,” The Guardian, July 16, 2012, www.theguardian.com.
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