The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [202]
16. A. C. D. Crommelin, “Are the Spiral Nebulae External Galaxies?” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 12 (1918): 46.
17. Vesto Slipher, “Spectrographic Observations of Nebulae,” Popular Astronomy 23 (1915): 21–24.
18. From a letter dated June 8, 1921, Harvard University Archives, quoted in Bartusiak, Day We Found the Universe, 164.
19. Logbook, 100-inch Reflector, Box 29, 156. Quoted in Christianson, Edwin Hubble, 158.
20. Quoted in Christianson, Edwin Hubble, 159.
21. Quoted in Katherine Haramundanis, ed., Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 209.
22. Quoted in Christianson, Edwin Hubble, 161.
23. Stenger has made this and similar arguments for the natural origin of the universe in several of his excellent books. See, for example, Victor Stenger, The New Atheism (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2009); Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2008); and Stenger, Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2009).
24. Einstein solved this problem through his theory of relativity by demonstrating that space objects such as stars distort the space-time around them—planets are not “attracted” to the star because of a mysterious force called “gravity”; planets “fall” around the star by moving through the curved space-time around it.
25. Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (New York: BasicBooks, 2000).
26. John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), vii.
27. Philosopher Robert Lawrence Kuhn outlined the problem and at least twenty-seven different solutions to it in a brilliantly executed article: “Why This Universe? Toward a Taxonomy of Possible Explanations,” Skeptic 13, no. 3 (2007): 28–39.
28. John Barrow and John Webb, “Inconstant Constants,” Scientific American, June 2005, 57–63.
29. Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (New York: Dutton/Penguin, 2010), 50.
30. Martin J. Rees, Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others (New York: Perseus Books, 1998); Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Rees, “Exploring Our Universe and Others,” Scientific American, December 1999; John Leslie, Universes (London: Routledge, 1989).
31. Carroll, From Eternity to Here, 51, 64.
32. Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, “A Cyclic Model of the Universe,” Science 296, no. 5572 (May 2002): 1436–39.
33. Alan Guth, “The Inflationary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Horizon and Flatness Problems,” Physical Review D 23, no. 2 (1981): 347; Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1997); Andrei Linde, “The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, November 1991, 48–55; Linde, “Current Understanding of Inflation,” New Astronomy Reviews 49 (2005): 35–41; Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
34. Justin Khoury, Burt A. Ovrut, Paul J. Steinhardt, and Neil Turok, “Density Perturbations in the Ekpyrotic Scenario,” Physical Review D 66, no. 4 (2002): 046005; Jeremiah P. Ostriker and Paul Steinhardt, “The Quintessential Universe,” Scientific American, January 2001, 46–53.
35. Raphael Bousso and Joseph Polchinski, “The String Theory Landscape,” Scientific American, September 2004.
36. Victor Stenger, The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1995); Stenger, “Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Us?” in Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism, ed. Matt Young and Taner Edis (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
37. Hugh Everett, “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,” Reviews of Modern Physics 29, no. 3 (1957): 454–62, reprinted in The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum