EXPANDED UNIVERSE by Robert A. Heinlein

Author:Robert A. Heinlein [Heinlein, Robert A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-07-20T08:59:31+00:00

1965 This prediction stands. But today physics is in a tremendous state of flux with new data piling up faster than it can be digested; it is anybody’s guess as to where we are headed, but the wilder you guess, the more likely you are to hit it lucky. With “elementary particles” of nuclear physics now totaling about half the number we used to use to list the “immutable” chemical elements, a spectator needs a program just to keep track of the players. At the other end of the scale, “quasars”-quasi-stellar bodies-have come along; radio astronomy is now bigger than telescopic astronomy used to be; and we have redrawn our picture of the universe several times, each time enlarging it and making it more complex-I haven’t seen this week’s theory yet, which is well, as it would be out of date before this gets into print. Plasma physics was barely started in 1950; the same for solid-state phys

ics. This is the Golden Age of physics-and it’s an anarchy.

19801 stick by the basic prediction. There is so much work going on both by mathematical physicists and experimental physicists as to the nature of gravity that it seems inevitable that twenty years from now 284

applied physicists will be trying to control it. But note that I said

“trying”-succeeding may take a long time. If and when they do succeed, a spinoff is likely to be a spaceship that is in no way a rocket ship-and the Galaxy is ours! (Unless we meet that smarter, meaner, tougher race that kills us or enslaves us or eats us-or all three.)

Particle physics: the situation is even more confusing than in 1965.

Physicists now speak of more than 200 kinds of hadrons,

“elementary” heavy particles. To reduce this confusion a mathematical construct called the “quark” was invented. Like Jell-0

quarks come in many colors and flavors.. . plus spin, charm, truth, and beauty (or top and bottom in place of truth and beauty-or perhaps “truth” doesn’t belong in the list, and no jokes, please, as the physicists aren’t joking and neither am I). Put quarks together in their many attributes and you can account for (maybe) all those 200-odd hadrons (and have a system paralleling the leptons or light particles as a bonus).

All very nice.. . except that no one has ever been able to pin down even one quark. Quarks, if they exist, come packaged in clumps as hadrons-not at random but by rules to account for each of that mob of hadrons.

Now comes Kenneth A. Johnson, Ph.D. (Harvard ‘55), Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (which certainly places him in the worldwide top group of physicists) with an article (Scientific American, July 1979, p. 112, “The Bag Model of Quark Confinement”), an article which appears to state that quarks will never be pinned down because

they are in sort of an eternal purdah, never to be seen even as bubble tracks. -

Somehow it reminds me of the dilemma when the snark is a boojum.

I’m not poking fun at Dr.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.