Epstein Secrets

rtainty principle, as the energy it can carry is so small that no visible violation of the conservation of en- ergy will occur. Thus, an electron on Earth can emit a virtual photon that could travel to Alpha Centauri, four light-years away, and that pho- ton can still produce a force on an electron the

lating the weak interac- tion to electromagnetism that he encouraged one of his dozen graduate students at Harvard at the time to explore the issue. Sheldon Glashow graduated in 1958 with a thesis on the subject and continued to explore the issue for the next few years as a National Science Foundation post- doc

0. The strands of cable needed to make up the magnetic coils in the LHC span about 270,000 kilometers, or about six times the circum- ference of the Earth. If all the filaments in the strands were unrav- eled, they would stretch to the Sun and back more than five times. 11. The total energy in each bea

and was invited (in 1966) to speak at several locations in the USA, where he was spending a sabbati- cal year. After Higgs's talk at Harvard, where Sheldon Glashow was now a professor, Glashow apparently complimented him on having invented a "nice model" and moved on. Such was the fixation on the strong in- te

ance. Since the Big Bang implies that the early universe was hot and dense, conditions ex- isted then that we might never achieve in laboratories on Earth. But if we are clever, we can look for remnant signatures of those early times out in the cosmos, and we may be able test our ideas about even the

after I finished the first version of this book. I received com- ments and useful suggestions and corrections in response, and I want to thank both Sheldon Glashow and Wally Gilbert for their suggestions, as well as Richard Dawkins, and I am particularly indebted to one of the colleagues I admire most for his