Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [0]
on Heaven’s
Door
HOW PHYSICS AND SCIENTIFIC
THINKING ILLUMINATE THE UNIVERSE
AND THE MODERN WORLD
Lisa Randall
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part I
SCALING REALITY
Chapter 1 What’s So Small to You Is So Large to Me
Chapter 2 Unlocking Secrets
Chapter 3 Living in a Material World
Chapter 4 Looking for Answers
Part II
SCALING MATTER
Chapter 5 The Magical Mystery Tour
Chapter 6 “Seeing” Is Believing
Chapter 7 The Edge of the Universe
Part III
MACHINERY, MEASUREMENTS, AND PROBABILITY
Chapter 8 One Ring to Rule Them All
Chapter 9 The Return of the Ring
Chapter 10 Black Holes That Will Devour the World
Chapter 11 Risky Business
Chapter 12 Measurement and Uncertainty
Chapter 13 The CMS and ATLAS Experiments
Chapter 14 Identifying Particles
Part IV
MODELING, PREDICTING, AND ANTICIPATING RESULTS
Chapter 15 Truth, Beauty, and Other Scientific Misconceptions
Chapter 16 The Higgs Boson
Chapter 17 The World’s Next Top Model
Chapter 18 Bottom-Up Versus Top-Down
PART V
SCALING THE UNIVERSE
Chapter 19 Inside Out
Chapter 20 What’s So Large to You Is So Small to Me
Chapter 21 Visitors from the Dark Side
Part VI
ROUNDUP
Chapter 22 Think Globally and Act Locally
Conclusion
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Works
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Endnotes
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. XKCD comic.
2. Line segments.
3. Eiffel Tower as seen from different scales.
4. Temperature and pressure.
5. Three interpretations of light.
6. Scrovegni Chapel image.
7. Galileo experiment with an inclined plane.
8. Optical illusion.
9. Phases of Venus.
10. Cosmological systems.
11. Painting of the sublime
12. “Physics souffié.”
13. Tour of small scales.
14. Atom size versus wavelength of visible light.
15. An atom.
16. Valence quarks in a proton.
17. Production of matter and antimatter.
18. More complete picture of a proton.
19. Unification of forces.
20. Rutherford experiment.
21. Fixed-target versus collider experiment.
22. Differences among colliders.
23. The particle physics Standard Model.
24. The LHC in its setting.
25. Schematic of LHC rings.
26. A cryodipole magnet cross section.
27. The faulty busbar connection.
28. LHC time line.
29. Looking into the ATLAS cavern.
30. Visiting CMS.
31. Looking down the beam pipe.
32. The ATLAS and CMS detectors.
33. Graphic of the CMS detector.
34. Simulation of a particle event in the ATLAS detector.
35. Visiting CMS.
36. Lead tungstate crystal.
37. Part of the ATLAS ECAL.
38. The CMS muon detector under construction.
39. Graphic of the ATLAS detector.
40. The Standard Model in more detail.
41. Particle jets.
42. Standard Model particle identification at the LHC.
43. Bottom quark signature.
44. W boson decay.
45. Measuring the W mass.
46. Pictorial summary of the Standard Model.
47. Richard Serra sculptures.
48. Religious symbols.
49. Chartres Cathedral and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
50. Asymmetry in Japanese art.
51. Higgs boson production modes.
52. Heavy Higgs boson decay to W bosons.
53. Light Higgs boson decay to a bottom quark and its antiparticle.
54. The hierarchy problem of particle physics.
55. Contribution to the Higgs boson mass from virtual particles.
56. Conference slide with different models.
57. Table of the supersymmetric Standard Model.
58. Supersymmetric contributions to the Higgs mass.
59. Squark decay.
60. Squark production and decay at the LHC.
61. “Tightrope universe.”
62. “Showerbrane.”
63. An open and a closed string.
64. Braneworld.
65. “Gravity sprinkler.”
66. Kaluza-Klein particle from large extra dimensions.
67. The graviton and warped geometry.
68. Rescaling in warped geometry.
69. KK particle production and decay in warped geometry.
70. Tour of large scales.
71. Red and blue shifts.
72. “Ballooniverse.”
73. Curved spaces.
74. Pie chart of energy densities in the universe.
75. Gravitational lensing.
76. The Bullet cluster.
77. Expansion of the universe over time.
78. Detecting