Epstein Secrets

) in classical gravitational fields. Indeed it is more natural to express the effect in terms of the quantity g, the gravitational acceleration near Earth's surface, which is the relevant aspect of the experimental environment, and then 0, which indicates intrinsically gravitational dynamics, does not

ngapore, where he lectured on this subject. We also thank Andrew Long, Subir $abharwal, Tannery Vachaspati for useful discussions and Freeman Dyson, Steve Weinberg and Ed Witten for comments on early drafts of this manuscript. LMK is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy at ASU, and also by Australian Nat

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

r time, or so most physi- cists thought. One of the many people who were fascinated by the physics of the strong interaction was the young theorist Steven Weinberg. There is po- etry here as well. Weinberg grew up in New York City and attended the Bronx High School of Science, from which he graduated in 195o.

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

l constant—and yet so small as to allow the kind of gentle acceleration we are now experiencing. (One plausible explanation does exist—first due to Steve Weinberg—though it is speculative and re- lies on speculative ideas about possible physics well beyond the realm of anything we currently understand. If ther

Guth, Lake Views: This World and the Universe by Steven L. Weinberg, The Coherence of Theism by Richard Swinburne, an

of the world in what might just be called a race to the top. So how will the first tete-a-tete go between their leaders, the two most powerful men on Earth, U.S. President Barack Obama and China's leader, Xi Jinping, will meet just over a week from now in an informal setting at the aptly named Sunnylands