The Story of Science, Book 3: Einstein Adds a New Dimension

1069 Pages·2007·103.5 MB·English

by  Joy Hakim

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Dedication Page
Albert Einstein composed a handwritten message to the young daughter of a
fellow professor. (It was 1921, and he was in Bologna, Italy. The professor was
Federigo Enriques; his daughter was Adriana Enriques.) This is what Einstein
wrote: Study and, in general, the pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in
which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
Permitted to remain children? Yes, he saw it as a privilege. Einstein also
understood that the intense curiosity that is part of being a child is a key to
creativity. Those who pursue truth and do it well—in any field—almost always
hold on to the inquisitiveness and imagination that is part of being young.
Einstein believed this all his life. In 1947, when he was what many would call
an old man, he wrote to a friend, Otto Juliusburger, who was celebrating his
eightieth birthday, People like you and me, though mortal, of course, like everyone else,
do not grow old no matter how long we live. What I mean is that we never cease to stand
like curious children before the great Mystery into which we are born. This interposes a
distance between us and all that is unsatisfactory in the human sphere—and that is no
small matter.
So this book is written for young thinkers—of all ages. I hope it will answer
some questions and lead to new ones. It is written for you, dear reader, for my
children and grandchildren, for Sabine Russ’s son, and Byron Hollinshead’s
grandsons, and for some bright rising stars, who all happen to be Taylors. They
are:
Meredith Christine Taylor Cynthia Grace Taylor
Bradley James Taylor Abigail Claire Frank Taylor
Samantha Marie Taylor Samuel Bennett Frank Taylor
Katherine Rose Taylor Mao Mao Andrew den Heeten
Victoria Lynne Taylor
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION: ABOUT QUARKS, RED GIANTS, AND WHY THIS BOOK GOT
WRITTEN
Chapter 1: A Boy with Something on His Mind
Chapter 2: Time on Replay
Chapter 3: Electrifying Thoughts and Magnetic Reasoning
FEATURE: Three Charged Americans
Chapter 4: The M. and M.’s of Science
FEATURE: If You Want Something, Go for It!
Chapter 5: Invisible Bits of Electricity
FEATURE: Charging on—to e
Chapter 6: Smaller than Atoms? Subatomic? Is This a Joke?
Chapter 7: Nobel Marie
Chapter 8: Mysterious Rays
Chapter 9: Making Waves
Chapter 10: Five Papers
Chapter 11: Seeing the (Photon) Light
FEATURE: Blue Skies Smiling at Us
Chapter 12: Molecules Move
Chapter: 13 Getting the Picture Right
Chapter 14: Getting Atom
FEATURE: Atoms Go from Weight to Number (Periodic Table)
FEATURE: In the Elemental Grocery Store
Chapter 15: Still Shooting Alpha Particles
Chapter 16: Bohr Taking Quantum Leaps
Chapter 17: An American Tracks Photons; a Frenchman Nails Matter
Chapter 18: What’s Uncertain? Everything, Says Heisenberg
Chapter 19: A Cat, Quarks, and Other Quantum Critters
FEATURE: Up and Atom: A Review of Atomic Theory Basics
Chapter 20: Smashing Atoms
Chapter 21: Chemistry, Charisma, and Peace
FEATURE: What’s in a Bond?
Chapter 22: Energy Equals Mass Times the Square of the Speed of
Light or E=mc2
Chapter 23: On the Way to War (a List of Happenings)
Chapter 24: The Fission Vision
Chapter 25: Presidential Power
Chapter 26: Manhattan on a Mesa
Chapter 27: Quantum Electrodynamics? Surely You’re Joking
Chapter 28: Those Relatives: Galileo and Albert
Chapter 29: Relativity: It’s About Time
FEATURE: Light Does Its Own Thing
Chapter 30: An Event? To a Physicist It’s Not a Party
FEATURE: Math Matters: Euclidean and Non
Chapter 31: Timely Dimensions
Chapter 32: A Man in a Red Hat
Chapter 33: The Paradox of the Twins
Chapter 34: Relative Gravity
Chapter 35: Warps in Spacetime
Chapter 36: Does It Change? Or Is It Changeless?
Chapter 37: Expanding Times
Chapter 38: An Expanding Universe
Chapter 39: A Luminous Indian
Chapter 40: Explosive? And How!
Chapter 41: Singular Black Holes
Chapter 42: Gravity Waves?
FEATURE: May the Interaction Be with You
Chapter 43: A Singular BANG with a Background
Chapter 44: Inflation? This Chapter Is Not About Economics!
FEATURE: TOE Be or Not TOE Be
Chapter 45: Entanglement? Locality? Are We Talking Science?
Chapter 46: Super Stars
FEATURE: Experts on the Dark Side
Chapter 47: A Surprising Information-Age Universe
Chapter 48: Is Anyone Out There?
Chapter 49: This Is the Last Chapter, but It’s Not the End
READ ON
PICTURE CREDITS
INDEX
PERMISSIONS
About Quarks, Red Giants, and Why
This Book Got Written
You are a quark warehouse. Me, too. The desk I’m leaning on is, too. What’s
a quark? Ha! You’ll have to read this book to find out. Actually, that’s why I
wrote the book: to find out for myself. When I want to learn something, I write
a book. (Not a bad way to learn.) I’d been hearing scientific terms, like relativity
and quantum theory, and I didn’t know what to make of them. Then I read
about neutrinos, the Big Bang, and red giants—and I was really lost. So I wrote
this book for me, and for people like me, who are curious about the world
around us.
That world is strange—and it seems to be getting stranger. Or maybe it is just
that modern science is telling us about things—like dark energy—that no one yet
understands. As for today’s science of cosmology? Ah, if only Galileo were here
and could know what we now know. Cosmology has brought us solid data,
beyond conjecture, that tells us the universe has an unfolding story. We now
know, for instance, that ours is an expanding universe and that the expansion has
begun to speed up.
There was a time when everyone seemed to believe that science was sober and
serious, and that if you wanted to be imaginative you had to turn to fantasy.
When it came to imagination, I didn’t think science could touch Star Wars or
Hollywood’s special effects.
But, next to modern science, the big screen is no big deal. Today’s science is
more astonishing than anything science-fiction writers have ever invented. (My
editor doesn’t agree. She says good sci-fi takes the best of cutting-edge science
and runs with it for a relationship that is mutually mind-bending. Maybe, but I’m
awed by the real stuff.)
We now know (thanks to Albert Einstein) that time on your watch may tick
differently from time on mine. It depends on how fast we’re traveling relative to
each other. And quarks? There isn’t much chance you’ll see a quark—even with
our most sophisticated microscopes. Quarks are so small they make atoms seem
mountainous.
But let’s talk about big. Our universe is so vast that it would take some 13.7
billion years for a beam of light to travel from its farthest regions to a telescope on
your roof. (How did we figure out 13.7 billion years? How old is the Earth?
How fast does light travel? You’ll find out in this book.)
Lewis Carroll, the nineteenth-century mathematician who wrote Alice in
Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, had the White Queen say to Alice,
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Carroll may have had
hints of what we know today: Time doesn’t have to go in only one direction.
As for gravity, well, it isn’t what Newton thought it was when that legendary
apple hit his head. Albert Einstein came along and told us that gravitation isn’t a
force at all.
When Einstein was a young man, he didn’t know what we now know: Our
galaxy, with its billions of stars, is just one of perhaps 100 billion galaxies. Yet
Einstein’s theories predicted the black holes that seem to lie at the center of those
galaxies. Black holes? Fall into one and you might see the past—and maybe the
future—whiz by on the way to having the nuclei in your atoms recycled.
But black holes are old news. You’re a citizen of the twenty-first century, and
cosmic wormholes are beckoning. Wormholes? They could be the way future
astronauts will travel from this universe to another. Other universes? Just keep
reading; you may be surprised at what you’ll learn.