Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [195]
The universe repeatedly reveals itself to be cleverer than we are. Equations or observations open up ideas that no one would have dreamed of—and only creative open-minded inquiries will unearth such hidden phenomena in the future. Without incontrovertible evidence, no scientist would have invented quantum mechanics, and I suspect that anticipating the precise structure of DNA and the myriad phenomena that make up life would have been pretty nearly impossible unless we were faced with the phenomena or equations that told us what was there. The Higgs mechanism is ingenious, as are the inner workings of the atom and the behavior of the particles that underlie everything we see.
Research is an organic process. We don’t necessarily always know where we are headed, but experiments and theory serve as valuable guides. Preparation and skill, concentration and perseverance, asking the right questions, and cautiously trusting our imaginations will all help us in our search for understanding. So will open minds, conversations with others, wanting to do better than our predecessors or peers, and believing there are answers. No matter what the motivation, and independently of the particular skills that might come into play, scientists will continue to investigate inward and outward—and look forward to learning about the other ingenious mechanisms the universe has in store.
CONCLUSION
When I first looked at translations of German media reports on my physics research or my book, Warped Passages,75 I was surprised by the repeated presence of the words “edge of the universe.” The explanation of the plausible but seemingly random appearance of the phrase wasn’t quite obvious at first—it turned out to be the computer’s German translation of my last name.76
Yet we are indeed at the edge of the universe, both on small scales and on large ones. Scientists have experimentally explored distances from the weak scale of 10-17 centimeters to the size of the universe, 1030 centimeters. We can’t be sure what the scales that demarcate true paradigm shifts in the future will be, but many scientific eyes are now focused on the weak scale, which the LHC and dark matter searches are experimentally exploring. At the same time, theoretical work continues to investigate scales ranging from the weak to the Planck energies, and to larger scales as well, as we attempt to fill in gaps in our understanding. It’s hubris to think that what we’ve seen is all there is. New discoveries almost certainly await.
The era of modern science represents a mere blip on the timeline of history. But the remarkable insights gained through advances in technology and mathematics since its birth in the seventeenth century have taken us an impressively long way toward understanding the world.
This book has explored how high-energy physicists and cosmologists today determine their course and how a combination of theory and experiment could shed light on some deep and fundamental questions. The Big Bang theory describes the universe’s current expansion, but it leaves open the questions of what happened earlier—and what is the nature of dark energy and dark matter. The Standard Model predicts elementary particle interactions, but leaves unresolved questions about why its properties are what they are. Dark matter and the Higgs boson could be around the corner—as could evidence for new spacetime symmetries or even new dimensions of