Epstein Secrets

jects obscure that they are actually attracted to the earth's surface at the same rate; and Darwin's epic realization that the diversity of life on Earth could arise from a single progenitor by the simple process of natural selection. None of these connections was all that obvious, at first. However,

this subject? —Martin Rees, author of Just Six Numbers "It is an exhilarating experience to be led through this fascinating story, from Galileo to the Standard Model and the Higgs boson and beyond, with lucid detail and insight, illuminating vividly not only the achieve- ments themselves but also the joy of creat

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

ne wanted to talk about the details in public. 2P_GrealetaleryEverTold_AC.indd 254 12/16116 3:06 PIA EFTA00286176 Spanking the Vacuum 255 That the Standard Model didn't fix in advance many of the details of the Higgs sector didn't dissuade many theorists from proposing models that "predicted" the Higgs mass

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

etical physics. It took several centuries or, if one counts back to the science of the Greeks, several millennia of hits and misses to come up with the Standard Model. So this is where we are. Are great new experimental insights just around the corner that may validate, or invalidate, some of the grander specula