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PREFACE

  1. For an excellent recent biography of Copernicus, see Dava Sobel, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos (New York: Walker, 2011).

  2. J. Richard Gott III et al., “A Map of the Universe,” Astrophysical Journal 624, no. 2 (2008): 463.

  3. H. M. Collins, “Introduction: Stages in the Empirical Program of Relativism,” Social Studies of Science 11, no. 1 (1981): 3–10.

CHAPTER 1. FROM MYTH TO SCIENCE

  1. John David North, Cosmos: An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  2. Stefano Liberati, “Greek Cosmology,” from Spring 2003 course at the University of Maryland, http://www.physics.umd.edu/courses/Phys117/Liberati/Support/cosmology.pdf (accessed October 29, 2012).

  3. A comprehensive review of cosmology in the ancient Near East can be found in Edward T. Babinski, “The Cosmology of the Bible,” in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails, edited by John W. Loftus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), pp. 109–47.

  4. Jean Bottéro, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 77–90.

  5. Helge Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos from Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 9.

  6. George L. Robinson, Leaders of Israel: A Brief History of the Hebrews from the Earliest Times to the Downfall of Jerusalem, A.D. 70 (New York: International Committee of Young Men's Christian Associations, 1906).

  7. Steve Wells notes 462 contradictions in the Old and New Testaments in Steve Wells, The Skeptics Annotated Bible (Moscow, ID: SAB Books, 2012).

  8. George Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis, Containing the Description of the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, the Times of the Patriarchs, and Nimrod: Babylonian Fables, and Legends of the Gods; From the Cuneiform Inscriptions (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1876).

  9. Gary D. Thompson, “The Development, Heyday, and Demise of Panbabylonism,” 2012, http://members.westnet.com.au/Gary-David-Thompson/page9e.html (accessed October 28, 2012).

10. William Lane Craig, “Philosophical and Scientific Pointers to Creatio Ex Nihilo,” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 32, no. 1 (1980): 5–13; Dinesh D’Souza, What's So Great about Christianity (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2007).

11. Tim Callahan, “Out of Nothing? The Genesis Creation Myth Is Not Unique,” Skeptic 17, no. 3 (2012): 20–22.

12. Richard Alleyne, “God Is Not the Creator, Claims Academic,” Telegraph (UK), October 8, 2009.

13. Callahan, “Out of Nothing?”

14. E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life; Egyptian Religion (New York: University Books, 1959), p. 38.

15. Ibid., p. 37.

16. Ibid., p. 42.

17. David Adams Leeming, Creation Myths of the World: An Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), p. 3.

18. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, p. 13.

19. Geoffrey S. Kirk, John E. Raven, and Malcolm Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

20. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 27.

21. Arthur Fairbanks, ed. and trans., The First Philosophers of Greece (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1898), pp. 8–16.

22. Mary Ackworth Orr, Dante and the Early Astronomers (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1969), p. 53; originally published in 1914 (London, Edinburgh: Gall and Inglis).

23. Victor J. Stenger, God and the Atom: From Democritus to the Higgs Boson (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013).

24. Orr, Dante and the Early Astronomers, pp. 55–56.

25. Epicurus, The Art of Happiness, trans. George K. Strodach (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).

26. A. E. Stallings and Richard Jenkyns, Lucretius: The Nature of Things (London; New York: Penguin, 2007), pp. 67–68.

27. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, p. 18.

28. Stallings and Jenkyns, Lucretius, pp. 18–19.

29. John David North, Cosmos: An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 70.

30. Orr, Dante and the Early Astronomers, p. 61.

31. Ibid., p. 63.

32. Ibid., pp. 62–63.

33. Ibid., pp. 63–64.

34. Ibid., pp. 68–70.

35. Plato, Timaeus 31 a, b.

36. Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, p. 39.

37. Ibid., pp. 42–43.

38. From NASA's website at http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/universe_level2/cosmology.html (accessed August 8, 2013).

39. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, pp. 21–23.

40. Ibid., p. 25.

41. Otto Neugebauer, Notes on Hipparchus (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1956).

42. Orr, Dante and the Early Astronomers, p. 101.

43. As quoted in Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, p. 29.

44. From Webster's New World College Dictionary (Cleveland, OH: Wiley Publishing, 2010), available at YourDictionary.com, http://www.yourdictionary.com/ptolemaic-system (accessed December 25, 2013).

45. See lists in Orr, Dante and the Early Astronomers, p. 116.

46. Ibid., p. 125.

CHAPTER 2. TOWARD THE NEW COSMOS

  1. Helge Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos from Myths to the Accelerating Universe: a History of Cosmology (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 34.

  2. Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom: Two Volumes in One, Great Minds Series (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993), p. 97. Many Christian authors have tried to undermine White by claiming that he said the Church officially opposed the idea that Earth is spherical. He did not, as you can read for yourself.

  3. Ibid., p. 35.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid., p. 37.

  6. Ibid., pp. 32–33.

  7. Ibid., p. 38.

  8. Jim al-Khalili, The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance (New York: Penguin, 2011).

  9. Ibid., p. 132.

10. Ibid., p. 182.

11. Ibid., p. 212.

12. Ibid., pp. 213–21.

13. Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

14. Dava Sobel, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos (New York: Walker, 2011).

15. Ibid., p. 7.

16. Ibid., p. 18.

17. Ibid., p. 20.

18. Giese lies at rest next to Copernicus in Frauenberg (Frombork) Cathedral.

19. Sobel, More Perfect Heaven, p. 174.

20. Ibid., p. 178.

21. Ibid., p. 186.

22. Amir R. Alexander, Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World (New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2014).

23. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 88–105.

24. Owen Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1993), p. 181.

25. Victor J. Stenger, God and the Atom: From Democritus to the Higgs Boson (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013).

26. Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius, Or, the Sidereal Messenger, trans. Albert Van Helden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). First published in 1610.

27. As quoted in Helge Kragh, Matter and Spirit in the Universe: Scientific and Religious Preludes to Modern Cosmology, vol. 3, History of Modern Physical Sciences (London: Imperial College Press, 2004), p. 7.

28. I am following my usual convention of referring to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic supreme divinity as God (uppercase) and all other divinities as god (lowercase). I will also assume God is personal and male, as in tradition, while god is impersonal and asexual.

29. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence: Together with Extracts from Newton's Principia and Opticks (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1956) p. 11.

CHAPTER 3. BEYOND UNAIDED HUMAN VISION

  1. Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).

  2. Ibid., p. 141.

  3. Helge Kragh, Matter and Spirit in the Universe: Scientific and Religious Preludes to Modern Cosmology, vol. 3, History of Modern Physical Sciences (London: Imperial College, 2004), p. 12.

  4. Ibid., p. 14; Michael Hoskin, The Construction of the Heavens: William Herschel's Cosmology (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  5. C. M. Walmsley et al., “Herschel: The First Science Highlights,” Astronomy & Astrophysics 518 (2010): L10.

  6. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985).

  7. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

CHAPTER 4. GLIMPSES OF THE UNIMAGINED

  1. Jacques Laskar, “Stability of the Solar System,” http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Stability_of_the_solar_system#Laplace-Lagrange_stability_of_the_Solar_System (accessed December 4, 2012).

  2. Ibid.

  3. Pierre Simon Laplace, Exposition du système du monde (Paris: Impr. du Cercle-Social, An IV de la République Française, 1796).

  4. Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, trans. F. W. Truscott and F. L. Emory from 6th French ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1952).

  5. Ken Adler, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World (New York: Free Press, 2003).

  6. Ibid.

  7. Frank Stacey, “Kelvin's Age of the Earth Paradox Revisited,” Journal of Geophysical Research 105, no. B6 (2000): 13,155–58.

  8. Marcia Bartusiak, The Day We Found the Universe (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), chap. 2.

CHAPTER 5. HEAT, LIGHT, AND THE ATOM

  1. Helge Kragh, Matter and Spirit in the Universe: Scientific and Religious Preludes to Modern Cosmology (London: Imperial College Press, 2004); Helge Kragh, Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology (Aldershot, Hampshire, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008).

  2. Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p. 30.

  3. Rudolf Clausius, “On the Second Fundamental Theorem of the Mechanical Theory of Heat,” Philosophical Magazine 35 (1868): 404–19.

  4. William Thomson, Popular Lectures and Addresses, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1891), pp. 356–57.

  5. Kragh, Matter and Spirit in the Universe, pp. 46–47.

  6. James Clerk Maxwell, The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. W. D. Niven (New York: Dover Publications, 1965), pt. 2, p. 376.

  7. Helge Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos from Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 105.

  8. Ibid., pp. 105–106.

  9. Victor J. Stenger, God and the Atom: From Democritus to the Higgs Boson (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013).

10. Ludwig Boltzmann, “On Certain Questions of the Theory of Gases,” Nature 51 (1895): 483–85.

CHAPTER 6. THE SECOND PHYSICS REVOLUTION

  1. Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), p. 575.

  2. You will often hear someone say that the rest energy E = mc2 contained in a mass m is huge because c = 3 × 108 meters per second is so large. Actually, the value of c is arbitrary and the numerical value in this case is large because you chose to use a big number for c. Rest energy and mass are identical except for units.

  3. In 2011, CERN reported that neutrinos had been measured moving faster than light. The media headlined that Einstein had been proven wrong. It turned out that the result was caused by a loose electrical connection. But even if it had been true, Einstein's speed limit would not have been violated. The particles would just have been tachyons, allowed by relativity.

  4. Abraham Pais, “Subtle Is the Lord”: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 179.

  5. Clifford M. Will, Was Einstein Right? Putting General Relativity to the Test (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 93.

  6. Clifford M. Will, “The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment,” 2006, http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-2006-3/ (accessed December 24, 2012).

  7. Stephen W. Hawking, “Black Hole Explosions,” Nature 248, no. 5443 (1974): 30–31.

  8. Nina Byers, “E. Noether's Discovery of the Deep Connection between Symmetries and Conservation Laws,” 1999, http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~cwp/articles/noether.asg/noether.html (accessed January 15, 2013).

  9. A complex number c is a set of two real numbers a and b of the form c = a + ib, where i = √–1, that is, i2 = –1.

10. P. A. M. Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930).

11. Victor J. Stenger, Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), pp. 351–53; Luciano Burderi and Tiziana Di Salvo, “The Quantum Clock: A Critical Discussion on Space-Time,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.0207 (2012).

12. In quantum mechanics, the component of angular momentum along a given axis z is given as Jz = jzħ where jz is an integer, including zero, or a half integer.

CHAPTER 7. ISLAND UNIVERSES

  1. Marcia Bartusiak, The Day We Found the Universe (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), chap. 6; Nina Byers and Gary A. Williams, Out of the Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century Women to Physics (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  2. Vesto M. Slipher, “Spectrographic Observations of Nebulae,” Popular Astronomy 23 (1915): 21–24.

  3. Bartusiak, Day We Found the Universe, chap. 5.

  4. Ibid., chap. 4.

  5. Ibid., chap. 10.

  6. “Scientists Gather for 1920 Conclave,” Washington Post, April 25, 1920, p. 38.

  7. Harlow Shapley and Herber D. Curtis, “The Scale of the Universe,” Bulletin of the National Research Council 2, no. 11 (1921): 171–217.

  8. “Universe Multiplied a Thousand Times by Harvard Astronomer's Calculations,” New York Times, May 31, 1921, p. 1.

  9. Bartusiak, Day We Found the Universe, p. 194.

10. Ibid., p. 204.

11. “Finds Spiral Nebula Are Stellar Systems,” New York Times, November 23, 1924, p. 6.

12. Bartusiak, Day We Found the Universe, p. 214.

13. Edwin Hubble, “Cepheids in Spiral Nebulae,” Publications of the American Astronomical Society 5 (1925): 261–64.

14. Bartusiak, Day We Found the Universe, p. 217.

15. Ibid., pp. 220–24.

CHAPTER 8. A DYNAMIC COSMOS

  1. Albert Einstein, “Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity” (translated), in Cosmological Constants: Papers in Modern Cosmology, edited by Jeremy Bernstein and Gerald Feinberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 16–26. Note that reprints of many of the early cosmological papers can be found in this volume.

  2. Willem De Sitter, “On Einstein's Theory of Gravitation and Its Astronomical Consequences,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 78 (1917): 3–28.

  3. Pierre Kerzberg, The Invented Universe: The Einstein-De Sitter Controversy (1916-17) and the Rise of Relativistic Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989).

  4. Howard P. Robertson, “On the Foundations of Relativistic Cosmology,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 15, no. 11 (1929): 822–29.

  5. Alexander Friedmann, “Über Die Krümmung Des Raumes,” Zeitschrift für Physik 10, no. 1 (1922): 377–286; English translation in Alexander Friedmann, “On the Curvature of Space,” General Relativity and Gravitation 31, no. 12 (1999): 1991–2000.

  6. Ari Belenkiy, “Alexander Friedmann and the Origins of Modern Cosmology,” Physics Today 65, no. 10 (2012): 38–43.

  7. Georges Lemaître, “Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extra-galactiques” (“A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Growing Radius Accounting for the Radial Velocity of Extragalactic Nebulae”), Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles 47 (1927): 49.

  8. See my discussion of this meeting and the debate in Victor J. Stenger, The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), pp. 66–74.

  9. As I discovered a few years ago when my wife and I were staying at the Metropole Hotel in Brussels where the 1927 meeting was held, a photograph of the attendees is prominently displayed in the lobby. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2002163/1927-Solvay-Conference-Electrons-Photons-Is-greatest-meeting-minds-ever.html (accessed January 28, 2013).

10. Robert Smith, “Edwin P. Hubble and the Transformation of Cosmology,” Physics Today 43, no. 4 (1990): 52–58.

11. Marcia Bartusiak, The Day We Found the Universe (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), chap. 14.

12. Edwin Hubble, “A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 15, no. 3 (1929): 168–73. A free copy is available at http://www.pnas.org/content/15/3/168.full?ijkey=fdc5eaebb2fb9bfb2745c815793c187c8c7363fa&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha (accessed January 2, 2013).

13. Milton Humason, “The Large Radial Velocity of N.G.C. 7619,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 15, no. 3 (1929): 167–68.

14. Astronomers still use the antiquated parsec as their unit of distance. It is defined as the distance that produces a parallax of one second of arc for observations made six months apart on Earth. I will generally stick to the popularly more familiar light-years except where that would add to confusion, where 1 parsec = 3.26 light-years.

15. Robert P. Kirshner, “Hubble's Diagram and Cosmic Expansion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 1 (2004): 8–13.

16. Lemaître, “Univers Homogène.”

17. Georges Lemaître, “Expansion of the Universe, a Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius Accounting for the Radial Velocity of Extra-Galactic Nebulae,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 91 (1931): 490–501.

18. M. Livio, “Lost in Translation: Mystery of the Missing Text Solved,” Nature 479 (2011): 171–73.

19. Bartusiak, Day We Found the Universe, p. 249.

20. Edwin Powell Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1936).

21. Helge Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos from Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 149.

22. Arthur S. Eddington, “The End of the World: From the Standpoint of Mathematical Physics,” Nature 127 (1931): 447–53.

23. Arthur S. Eddington, The Expanding Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), pp. 56–57.

24. Georges Lemaître, “The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory,” Nature 127 (1931): 706.

25. Georges Lemaître, The Primeval Atom: An Essay on Cosmogony, trans. H. Betty and Serge A. Korff (New York: Van Nostrand, 1950).

26. Jean-Pierre Luminet, “Editorial Note to: Georges Lemaître, The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory,” General Relativity and Gravitation 43 (2011): 2911–28.

27. J. L. Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

28. Walter Baade, “A Revision of the Extra-Galactic Distance Scale,” Transactions of the International Astronomical Union 8 (1952): 397–98.

29. Pope Pius XII, “The Proofs for the Existence of God in the Light of Modern Natural Science,” address by Pope Pius XII to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, November 22, 1951, reprinted as “Modern Science and the Existence of God,” Catholic Mind 49 (1972): 182–92. Available online at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius12/P12EXIST.HTM (accessed January 27, 2013). The papal quotes in this section are all from this document.

30. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, pp. 150–51.

31. Paul Dirac, “A New Basis for Cosmology,” Proceedings of the Royal Society A 165 (1938): 199–208.

32. See discussion in Victor J. Stenger, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), pp. 59–62.

33. Edward Arthur Milne, Relativity, Gravitation and World-Structure (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935); Edward Arthur Milne, Kinematic Relativity: A Sequel to Relativity, Gravitation and World Structure (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948).

34. For a detailed discussion on Milne's science, philosophy, and theology, and the response of the scientific, philosophical, and theological communities, see Helge Kragh, Matter and Spirit in the Universe: Scientific and Religious Preludes to Modern Cosmology (London: Imperial College Press, 2004), pp. 200–29.

35. Victor J. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), pp. 39–45.

36. Kragh, Matter and Spirit in the Universe, pp. 169–72.

37. Hubble, Realm of the Nebulae, p. 199.

38. Kragh, Matter and Spirit in the Universe, pp. 212–19.

39. Edward Arthur Milne, Modern Cosmology and the Christian Idea of God (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), p. 62.

40. Milne, Relativity, Gravitation and World-Structure, p. 266.

41. For a layperson's survey of the history of dark matter, see Jeremiah P. Ostriker and Simon Mitton, Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe (Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013).

42. Reprinted with an explanatory introduction in Karl G. Jansky, “Electrical Disturbances of Extraterrestrial Origin,” Proceedings of the IEEE 86, no. 7 (1988): 1510–15.

CHAPTER 9. NUCLEAR COSMOLOGY

  1. Jeremiah P. Ostriker and Simon Mitton, Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe (Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 147–48.

  2. Helge Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos from Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 155–57.

  3. Edwin Hubble, “Problems of Nebular Research,” Scientific Monthly 51 (1940): 391–408.

  4. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, p. 160.

  5. For a nice explanation, see the Nobel Prize talk by John N. Bahcall, “How the Sun Shines,” http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/articles/fusion/ (accessed February 24, 2013).

  6. Carl Friedrich von Weizäcker, “Element Transformation inside Stars,” Physicalische Zeitschrift 39 (1938): 633–46, translated by Richard H. Milburn in Kenneth R. Lang and Owen Gingerich, A Source Book in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 1900–1975 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 309–18.

  7. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, pp. 162–63.

  8. A nice, short biography of Gamow can be found in Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), pp. 29–31.

  9. Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, Genesis of the Big Bang (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 71.

10. Ralph A. Alpher, Hans Bethe, and George Gamow, “The Origin of the Chemical Elements,” Physical Review 73, no. 7 (1948): 803–804.

11. Note that when we are talking about temperatures on the order of a million degrees, it is unnecessary to specify the units.

12. Ralph A. Alpher and Robert C. Herman, “Remarks on the Evolution of the Expanding Universe,” Physical Review 75 (1949): 1089–95.

13. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos, pp. 180–84.

14. Fred Hoyle, “A New Model for the Expanding Universe,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 108 (1948): 372–82.

15. Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, “The Steady-State Theory of the Expanding Universe,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 108 (1948): 252–70.

16. James Jeans, Astronomy and Cosmogony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928).

17. Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey R. Burbidge, and Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, A Different Approach to Cosmology: From a Static Universe through the Big Bang towards Reality, paperback ed. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

18. Helge Kragh, “Quasi-Steady-State and Related Cosmological Models: A Historical Review,” http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.3449v1.pdf (accessed May 5, 2013).

19. E. Margaret Burbidge, G. R. Burbidge, William A. Fowler, and F. Hoyle, “Synthesis of Elements in the Stars,” Reviews of Modern Physics 29, no. 4 (1957): 547–650.

20. E. E. Salpeter, “Nuclear Reactions in Stars without Hydrogen,” Astrophysical Journal 115 (1952): 326–28.

21. Fred Hoyle, “On Nuclear Reactions Occurring in Very Hot Stars. I. The Synthesis of Elements from Carbon to Nickel,” Astrophysical Journal Supplement 1 (1954): 121–46.

22. Fred Hoyle, “A New Model for the Expanding Universe,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 108 (1948): 372–82.

23. Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics 20 (1982): 1–35.

24. Fred Hoyle, Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist's Life (Mill Valley, CA: University Science Books, 1994), p. 413.

25. Maarten Schmidt, “3C 273: A Star-like Object with Large Red-Shift,” Nature 197 (1963): 1040.

26. Jesse L. Greenstein and Thomas A. Matthews, “Red-Shift of the Unusual Radio Source: 3C 48,” Nature 197 (1963): 1041–42.

27. Jesse L. Greenstein and Maarten Schmidt, “The Quasi-Stellar Radio Sources 3C 48 and 3C 273,” Astrophysical Journal 140 (1964): 1–34.

28. Dmitri Pogosian, “Astronomy 122: Astronomy of Stars and Galaxies,” 2013, http://www.ualberta.ca/~pogosyan/teaching/ASTRO_122/lect27/lecture27.html (accessed February 21, 2013).

29. A. Hewish et al., “Observation of a Rapidly Pulsating Radio Source,” Nature 217 (1968): 709–13.

CHAPTER 10. RELICS OF THE BIG BANG

  1. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, updated ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

  2. Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson, “A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature At 4080 Mc/s,” Astrophysical Journal 142 (1965): 41921.

  3. R. H. Dicke, P. J. E. Peebles, P. G. Roll, and D. T. Wilkinson, “Cosmic Black-Body Radiation,” Astrophysical Journal 142 (1965): 414–19.

  4. Weinberg, First Three Minutes, pp. 68–69.

  5. Ralph A. Alpher, James W. Follin Jr., and Robert C. Herman, “Physical Conditions in the Initial Stages of the Expanding Universe,” Physical Review 92 (1953): 1347–61.

  6. Weinberg, First Three Minutes, p. 124.

  7. Ibid., pp. 122–25.

  8. Dennis Overbye, “Essay; Remembering David Schramm, Gentle Giant of Cosmology,” New York Times, February 10, 1998, online at http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/10/science/essay-remembering-david-schramm-gentle-giant-of-cosmology.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (accessed February 6, 2013).

  9. Michael S. Turner, “David Norman Schramm 1945–1997,” 2009, http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/schramm-david.pdf (accessed February 6, 2012).

10. Edward W. Kolb and Michael S. Turner, The Early Universe (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990).

11. D. Z. Freedman, D. N. Schramm, and D. L. Tubbs, “The Weak Neutral Current and Its Effects in Stellar Collapse,” Annual Reviews of Nuclear Science 27 (1977): 167–207.

12. Gary Steigman, David N. Schramm, and James E. Gunn, “Cosmological Limits to the Number of Massive Leptons,” Physics Letters B 66, no. 2 (1977): 202–204.

13. A terrific source for always up-to-date cosmological information is Ned Wright's “Cosmological Tutorial,” http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm (accessed February 14, 2013). See his “Big Bang Nucleosynthesis” link for more details on this section.

14. Edward L. Wright, “Big Bang Nucleosynthesis,” 2012, http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/BBNS.html (accessed February 7, 2013).

15. S. Burles, K. M. Nollett, and M. S. Turner, “Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis: Linking Inner Space and Outer Space,” 1999, http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9903300v1.pdf (accessed February 7, 2013).

16. This figure was modified from Ned Wright's “Cosmological Tutorial.”

17. D. N. Spergel, R. Bean, O. Dore, M. R. Nolta, C. L. Bennett, J. Dunkley, G. Hinshaw, N. Jarosik, E. Komatsu, and L. Page, “Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Three Year Results: Implications for Cosmology,” Astrophysical Journal Suppl. 170 (2007): 377, preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/astroph/0603449 (accessed February 16, 2013); Richard H. Cyburt, Brian D. Fields, and Keith A. Olive, “Primordial Nucleosynthesis in Light of WMAP,” Physics Letters B 567 (2003): 227–34, preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302431v2 (accessed February 16, 2013).

18. Keith Olive and Evan D. Skillman, “A Realistic Determination of the Error on the Primordial Helium Abundance: Steps toward Non-Parametric Nebular Helium Abundances,” Astrophysical Journal 617 (2004): 29–49.

19. J. G. Matthews, T. Kajino, and T. Shima, “Big Bang Nucleosynthesis with a New Neutron Lifetime,” Physical Review D 71 (2005): 021302.

20. Hugh Ross, “Big Bang Model Refined by Fire,” in Mere Creation: Science, Faith & Intelligent Design, ed. William A. Dembski (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 1988), pp. 363–83.

21. Victor J. Stenger, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), p. 205.

CHAPTER 11. PARTICLES AND THE COSMOS

  1. Evgenii Lifshitz, “On the Gravitational Stability of the Expanding Universe,” Journal of Physics—USSR 10 (1946): 116.

  2. Edward R. Harrison, “Fluctuations at the Threshold of Classical Cosmology,” Physical Review D 1, no. 10 (1970): 2726.

  3. Yakov B. Zel’dovich, “A Hypothesis, Unifying the Structure and the Entropy of the Universe, 1972,” Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc 160 (1972): 1–3.

  4. Darcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), first published in 1917, p. 28.

  5. Rainer K. Sachs and Arthur M. Wolfe, “Perturbations of a Cosmological Model and Angular Variations of the Microwave Background,” Astrophysical Journal 147 (1967): 73.

  6. Joseph Silk, “Cosmic Black-Body Radiation and Galaxy Formation,” Astrophysical Journal 151 (1968): 459–71; Rashid A. Sunyaev and Ya B. Zel’dovich, “Small-Scale Fluctuations of Relic Radiation,” Astrophysics and Space Science 7, no. 1 (1970): 3–19; Philip J. E. Peebles and J. T. Yu, “Primeval Adiabatic Perturbation in an Expanding Universe,” Astrophysical Journal 162 (1970): 815–36.

  7. D. Hanson et al., “Detection of B-mode Polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background with Data from the South Pole Telescope,” Physical Review Letters 111 (2013): 141301.

  8. P. A. R. Ade et al., “A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background B-Mode Polarization Power Spectrum at Sub-Degree Scales with POLARBEAR,” (2014): to be published.

  9. Albert Bosma, “The Distribution and Kinematics of Neutral Hydrogen in Spiral Galaxies of Various Morphological Types” (doctoral thesis, University Gronigen, Gronigen, Netherlands, 1978). Available at http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March05/Bosma/frames.html (accessed September 2, 2013).

10. Spin is an angular momentum and is generally expressed in units of ħ = h/2π, where h is Planck's constant.

11. David Kaiser, “Physics and Feynman's Diagrams,” American Scientist 93 (2005): 156–65.

12. Although, in my 2000 book Timeless Reality I suggest how Feynman diagrams can be taken more literally than is usually assumed.

13. Sin-Itiro Tomonoga, “On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields,” Progress in Theoretical Physics 1, no. 2 (1946): 27–42; Julian Schwinger, “On Quantum-Electrodynamics and the Magnetic Moment of the Electron,” Physical Review 73, no. 4 (1948): 416–17; Richard Feynman, “Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics,” Physical Review 76, no. 6 (1949): 769–89; Freeman J. Dyson, “The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman,” Physical Review 75, no. 3 (1949): 486–502.

14. Victor J. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006).

15. Peter W. Higgs, “Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons,” Physical Review Letters 13 (1964): 508; F. Englert and R. Brout, “Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Bosons,” Physical Review Letters 13 (1964): 321; G. G. Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and T. W. Kibble, “Global Conservation Laws and Massless Particles,” Physical Review Letters 13 (1964): 585.

16. ATLAS Collaboration, “Observation of a New Particle in the Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC,” Physics Letters B 716, no. 1 (2012): 1–29; CMS Collaboration, “Observation of a New Boson at a Mass of 125 Gev with the CMS Experiment at the LHC,” Physics Letters B 716, no. 1 (2012): 30–61.

17. I have discussed this problem in two books: Victor J. Stenger, The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995); Victor J. Stenger, Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009).

18. David Tong, “Is Quantum Reality Analog after All?” Scientific American (November 26, 2012).

19. Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), p. 33.

20. Meinhard Kuhlmann, “What Is Real?” Scientific American (August 2013): 40–47.

21. J. Beringer and Particle Data Group et al., “The Review of Particle Physics,” Physical Review D 88 (2012): 010001, available online at http://pdg.lbl.gov/ (accessed February 22, 2013).

22. Andrei Sakharov, “Violation of CP Invariance, C Asymmetry, and Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe,” Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics Letters 5 (1967): 24–27. English translation available at http://www.jetpletters.ac.ru/ps/1643/article_25089.pdf courtesy of American Institute of Physics (accessed February 28, 2013).

23. Howard Georgi and S. L. Glashow, “Unity of All Elementary-Particle Forces,” Physical Review Letters 32 (1974): 438–41.

24. T. J. Goldman and D. A. Ross, “A New Estimate of the Proton Decay Lifetime,” Physics Letters B 84, no. 2 (1979): 208–11.

25. Super-Kamiokande Collaboration, “Proton Lifetime Is Longer Than 1034 Years,” 2011, http://www-sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/whatsnew/new-20091125-e.html (accessed February 22, 2013).

26. K. Hirata et al., “Observation of a Neutrino Burst from the Supernova SN1987A,” Physical Review Letters 58 (1987): 1490–93; IMB Collaboration, “Neutrinos from SN1987A in the IMB Detector,” Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A264 (1988): 28–31.

27. Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).

CHAPTER 12. INFLATION

  1. Hugh Ross, “Big Bang Model Refined by Fire,” in Mere Creation: Science, Faith & Intelligent Design, ed. William A. Dembski, pp. 363–83 (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 1998), pp. 372–75.

  2. Dinesh D’Souza, Life after Death: The Evidence (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2009), p. 84.

  3. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Toronto; New York: Bantam Books, 1988), pp. 121–22.

  4. William Lane Craig, “The Craig-Pigliucci Debate: Does God Exist?” http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/craig-pigliucci2.html (accessed July 12, 2013).

  5. Paul A. M. Dirac, “Quantised Singularities in the Electromagnetic Field,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, ser. A, containing papers of a mathematical and physical character (1931): 60–72.

  6. Gerard ’t Hooft, “Magnetic Monopoles in Unified Gauge Theories,” Nuclear Physics B 79, no. 2 (1974): 276–84.

  7. Alexander M. Polyakov, “Particle Spectrum in Quantum Field Theory,” Soviet Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics Letters 20 (1974): 194–95.

  8. T. W. B. Kibble, “Topology of Cosmic Domains and Strings,” Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General 9, no. 8 (1976): 1387–98.

  9. John P. Preskill, “Cosmological Production of Superheavy Magnetic Monopoles,” Physical Review Letters 43, no. 19 (1979): 1365–68.

10. For a good, nonmathematical discussion, see Alan H. Guth. The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), pp. 147–65.

11. For a recent review containing a complete list of references to both theory and experiment, see D. Milstead and E. J. Weinberg, “Magnetic Monopoles,” 2011, http://pdg.web.cern.ch/pdg/2011/reviews/rpp2011-rev-mag-monopole-searches.pdf (accessed March 9, 2013).

12. MACRO Collaboration, “Final Results of Magnetic Monopole Searches with the Macro Experiment,” European Journal of Physics C25 (2002): 511–22.

13. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, “The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, ser. A, 314 (1970): 529–48.

14. William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair, “The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William Lane Craig and James Porter Moreland (Chichester, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 101–201.

15. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Toronto; New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 50.

16. Demos Kazanas, “Dynamics of the Universe and Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking,” Astrophysical Journal 241 (1980): L59–L63.

17. Katsuhiko Sato, “First-Order Phase Transitions of a Vacuum and the Expansion of the Universe,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 195 (1981): 467–79.

18. Alan Guth, “Inflationary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Horizon and Flatness Problems,” Physical Review D 23, no. 2 (1981): 347–56.

19. Guth, Inflationary Universe.

20. Hawking, Brief History of Time, p. 128.

21. Alan H. Guth and Erick J. Weinberg, “Could the Universe Have Recovered from a Slow First-Order Phase Transition?” Nuclear Physics B 212, no. 2 (1983): 321–64.

22. Guth, Inflationary Universe, p. 203.

23. Andrei D. Linde, “A New Inflationary Universe Scenario: A Possible Solution of the Horizon, Flatness, Homogeneity, Isotropy and Primordial Monopole Problems,” Physics Letters B 108 (1982): 389.

24. Andreas Albrecht and Paul J. Steinhardt, “Cosmology for Grand Unified Theories with Radiatively Induced Symmetry Breaking,” Physical Review Letters 48, no. 17 (1982): 1220–23.

25. Guth, Inflationary Universe, p. 206.

26. Thanks to Mark Whittle for this analogy.

27. Victor J. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), mathematical supplement G.

28. Alan Michael Dressler, Voyage to the Great Attractor: Exploring Intergalactic Space (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1994).

29. R. Brent Tully and J. Richard Fisher, “A New Method of Determining Distances to Galaxies,” Astronomy and Astrophysics 54 (1977): 661–73.

30. R. Brent Tully and J. Richard Fisher, Nearby Galaxies Atlas (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

31. Margaret J. Geller and John P. Huchra, “Mapping the Universe,” Science 246, no. 4932 (1989): 897–903.

32. Hélene Courtois et al., “Cosmography of the Local Universe,” http://irfu.cea.fr/cosmography (accessed December 18, 2013).

33. Guth, Inflationary Universe, pp. 222–43.

34. James M. Bardeen, Paul J. Steinhardt, and Michael S. Turner, “Spontaneous Creation of Almost Scale-Free Density Perturbations in an Inflationary Universe,” Physical Review D 28, no. 4 (1983): 679.

35. This is a chemistry term. For example, if you ionize hydrogen atoms into protons and electrons, they will “recombine” into atoms.

36. Smoot tells his story in the bestseller George Smoot and Keay Davidson, Wrinkles in Time (New York: W. Morrow, 1993).

CHAPTER 13. FALLING UP

  1. See, for example, Eric J. Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1991).

  2. George Smoot and Keay Davidson, Wrinkles in Time (New York: W. Morrow, 1993), p. 241.

  3. John C. Mather et al., “Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Spectrum by the COBE FIRAS Instrument,” Astrophysical Journal 420 (1994): 439–44; The figure is from the NASA site http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/cobe/firas_image.cfm (accessed December 24, 2013).

  4. As quoted on the cover of Smoot and Davidson, Wrinkles in Time.

  5. George F. Smoot et al., “Structure in the COBE Differential Microwave Radiometer First-Year Maps,” Astrophysical Journal 396 (1992): L1–L5.

  6. Alan H. Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), p. 242.

  7. E. L. Wright et al., “Interpretation of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation Anisotropy Detected by the Cobe Differential Microwave Radiometer,” Astrophysical Journal 396 (1992): L13–L18.

  8. Jeremiah P. Ostriker and Simon Mitton, Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe (Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 201.

  9. NASA Science News, “Hubble Sees the Fireball from a ‘Kilonova,’” http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/03aug_kilonova/ (accessed August 4, 2013).

10. Victor J. Stenger, “The Production of Very High Energy Photons and Neutrinos from Cosmic Proton Sources,” Astrophysical Journal 284 (1984): 810–16.

11. Trevor C. Weekes et al., “Observation of TeV Gamma Rays from the Crab Nebula Using the Atmospheric Cerenkov Imaging Technique,” Astrophysical Journal 342 (1989): 379–95.

12. F. A. Aharonian, A. N. Timokhin, and A. V. Plyasheshnikov, “On the Origin of Highest Energy Gamma-Rays from Mkn 501,” Astronomy and Astrophysics 384, no. 3 (2002): 834–47.

13. Victor J. Stenger, “Neutrino Oscillations in DUMAND,” in Neutrino Mass: Mini-Conference and Workshop Transparencies, ed. V. Barger and D. Cline, pp. 174–78 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1980). A scanned copy of the paper can be found at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Telemark.pdf (accessed April 14, 2013).

14. Super-Kamiokande Collaboration, “Evidence for Oscillation of Atmospheric Neutrinos,” Physical Review Letters 81 (1998): 1562–67.

15. Because they are not stationary states but constantly mix with one another, the three neutrinos in the standard model do not have definite masses but are rather mixtures of three other neutrino states ν1, ν2, and ν3 that are stationary states. Technically, these are the states that have definite masses.

16. R. Svoboda and K. Gordan, “Neutrinos in the Sun,” 1998, http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap980605.html (accessed February 26, 2013).

17. For a pedagogical review of dark matter, see Guido D’Amico, Marc Kamionkowski, and Kris Sigurdson, “Dark Matter Astrophysics,” in Dark Matter and Dark Energy: A Challenge for Modern Cosmology, ed. Sabiuno Matarrese, Monica Colpi, Vittorio Gorini, and Ugo Moschella (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), pp. 241–72.

18. To read more about sterile neutrinos, see Eric Hand, “Hunt for the Sterile Neutrino Heats Up,” Nature 464 (2010): 334–35; also, Patrick Huber and Jon Link, “White Paper on Sterile Neutrinos,” http://cnp.phys.vt.edu/white_paper/whitepaper.pdf (accessed September 10, 2012).

19. Leonard Susskind, Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (New York: Little, Brown, 2005).

20. Lawrence M. Krauss and Michael S. Turner, “The Cosmological Constant Is Back,” General Relativity and Gravitation 27, no. 11 (1995): 1137–44.

21. G. de Vaucouleurs, “The Extragalactic Distance Scale and the Hubble Constant,” Observatory 102 (1982): 178–94.

22. Saul Perlmutter et al., “Measurements of Ω and Λ from 42 High-Redshift Supernovae,” Astrophysical Journal 517, no. 2 (1999): 565.

23. Adam G. Riess et al., “Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant,” Astronomical Journal 116, no. 3 (1998): 1009.

24. Steven Weinberg, “The Cosmological Constant Problem,” Reviews of Modern Physics 61, no. 1 (1989): 1–23.

25. Victor J. Stenger, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), pp. 213–31. Weinberg's derivation can also be found therein.

26. NASA Lambda, “Data Center for Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Research,” http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/links/experimental_sites.cfm (accessed April 21, 2013).

27. C. Barth Netterfield et al., “A Measurement of the Angular Power Spectrum of the Anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background,” Astrophysical Journal 474, no. 1 (1997): 47.

28. Ravi Subrahmanyan et al., “A Search for Arcminutescale Anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 263, no. 2 (1993): 416.

29. From S. Hancock et al., “Constraints on Cosmological Parameters from Recent Measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 294, no. 1 (1998): L1–L6.

CHAPTER 14. MODELING THE UNIVERSE

  1. A list of redshift surveys and links to their published results can be found at http://www.astro.ljmu.ac.uk/~ikb/research/galaxy-redshift-surveys.html (accessed May 29, 2013). The web page was created by Ivan K. Baldry.

  2. Daniel J. Eisenstein et al., “Detection of the Baryon Acoustic Peak in the Large-Scale Correlation Function of SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies,” Astrophysical Journal 633, no. 2 (2005): 560.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Andrew H. Jaffe et al., “Cosmology from Maxima-1, Boomerang, and COBEe DMR Cosmic Microwave Background Observations,” Physical Review Letters 86, no. 16 (2001): 3475–79.

  5. C. L. Bennett et al., “Nine-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Final Maps and Results,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.5225 (2012).

  6. N. Jarosik et al., “Seven-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Sky Maps, Systematic Errors, and Basic Results,” Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series 192, no. 2 (2011): 14.

  7. G. Hinshaw et al., “Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe Observations: Data Processing, Sky Maps, and Basic Results,” Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series 180, no. 2 (2009): 225.

  8. Mark Whittle, Cosmology: The History and Nature of Our Universe (Chantily, VA: Teaching, 2008), lectures 15 and 16.

  9. Mark Whittle, “Big Bang Acoustics,” 2000, http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~dmw8f/BBA_web/index_frames.html (accessed May 12, 2013).

10. Uros Seljak and Matias Zaldarriaga, “A Line of Sight Approach to Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies,” Astrophysical Journal 469 (1996): 437–44.

11. Planck Collaboration, P. A. R. Ade, et al., “Planck 2013 Results. I. Overview of Products and Scientific Results,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.5062 (2013).

12. Anja von der Linden et al., “Robust Weak-Lensing Mass Calibration of Planck Galaxy Clusters,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2014): to be published.

13. Jean-Christophe Hamilton, “What Have We Learned from Observational Cosmology?” (paper presented at the Philosophical Aspects of Modern Cosmology Meeting, Grenada, Spain, September 22–23, 2013).

14. See figure 1 in Planck Collaboration, “Planck 2013 Results. XXII. Constraints on Inflation,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.5082 (2013).

15. Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang (New York: Doubleday, 2007).

16. Justin Khoury et al., “The Ekpyrotic Universe: Colliding Branes and the Origin of the Hot Big Bang, 2001,” Physical Review D 64 (2001): 123522.

17. P. A. R. Ade et al., “Detection of B-Mode Polarization at Degree Angular Scales by BICEP2,” Physical Review Letters 112, no. 24 (2014): 241101.

18. Dennis Overbye, “Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang's Smoking Gun,” New York Times, March 17, 2014.

19. See, for example, plans for the LSST (Large Synoptic survey Telescope), available at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/ (accessed July 27, 2013).

20. Richard Massey, Thomas Kitching, and Johan Richard, “The Dark Matter of Gravitational Lensing,” Reports on Progress in Physics 73, no. 8 (2010): 086901.

21. Francesco Arneodo, “Dark Matter Searches” (paper presented at the 32th International Symposium on Physics in Collision [PIC 2012], Strbské Pleso, Slovakia, September 12–15, 2012).

22. D. S. Akerib et al., “First Results from the LUX Dark Matter Experiment at the Sanford Underground Research Facility,” 2013, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.8214 (accessed November 7, 2013).

23. Oscar Adriani et al., “An Anomalous Positron Abundance in Cosmic Rays with Energies 1.5–100 GeV,” Nature 458, no. 7238 (2009): 607–609.

24. Aous A. Abdo et al., “Measurement of the Cosmic Ray e+e- Spectrum from 20 GeV to 1 TeV with the Fermi Large Area Telescope,” Physical Review Letters 102, no. 18 (2009): 181101.

25. Tansu Daylan et al., “The Characterization of the Gamma-Ray Signal from the Central Milky Way: A Compelling Case for Annihilating Dark Matter,” arXiv preprint arXiv (2014): 1402.6703.

26. Arneodo, “Dark Matter Searches.”

27. M. Aguilar et al., “First Result from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station: Precision Measurement of the Positron Fraction in Primary Cosmic Rays of 0.5–350 GeV,” Physical Review Letters 110, no. 14 (2013): 141102.

28. Zurab G. Berezhiani and Rabindra N. Mohapatra, “Reconciling Present Neutrino Puzzles: Sterile Neutrinos as Mirror Neutrinos,” Physical Review D 52, no. 11 (1995): 6607–11.

29. E. Bulbul et al., “Detection of an Unidentified Emission Line in the Stacked X-Ray Spectrum of Galaxy Clusters,” Astrophysical Journal (in press, 2014); A. Boyarsky et al., “An Unidentified Line in X-Ray Spectra of the Andromeda Galaxy and Perseus Galaxy Cluster,” 2014, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.4119v1.pdf (accessed March 13, 2014).

30. Richard A. Battye and Adam Moss, “Evidence for Massive Neutrinos from Cosmic Microwave Background and Lensing Observations,” Physical Review Letters 112, no. 5 (2014): 051303; Mark Wyman et al., “Neutrinos Help Reconcile Planck Measurements with the Local Universe,” Physical Review Letters 112, no. 5 (2014): 051302.

31. V. Berezinsky, “High Energy Neutrino Astronomy,” Nuclear Physics B-Proceedings Supplements 19 (1991): 375–87; C. Spiering, “High-Energy Neutrino Astronomy: A Glimpse of the Promised Land J Arxiv Preprint,” arXiv:1402.2096 (2014).

32. IceCube Collaboration, “First Observation of PeV-Energy Neutrinos with IceCube,” http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.5356v2 (2013).

33. Floyd W. Stecker, “IceCube Observed PeV Neutrinos from AGN Cores,” Physical Review D 88 (2013): 047301.

CHAPTER 15: THE ETERNAL MULTIVERSE

  1. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, “The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, ser. A, 314 (1970): 529–48.

  2. William Lane Craig, The Kalam Cosmological Argument (London: Macmillan, 1979).

  3. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Toronto; New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 50.

  4. Arvind Borde, Alan H. Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, “Inflationary Spacetimes Are Not Past-Complete,” Physical Review Letters 90 (2003): 151301.

  5. Alexander Vilenkin, e-mail communication with author, May 21, 2010.

  6. Anthony N. Aguirre and Steven Gratton, “Steady-State Eternal Inflation,” Physical Review D 65, no. 8 (2002): 083507; “Inflation without a Beginning: A Null Boundary Proposal,” Physical Review D 67 (2003): 083515.

  7. Sean M. Carrol, and Jennifer Chen, “Spontaneous Inflation and the Origin of the Arrow of Time,” http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0410270 (2004) (accessed May 22, 2010).

  8. Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig, “Greer-Heard Forum: God and Cosmology,” 2014, http://www.greerheard.com (accessed March 23, 2014).

  9. William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair, “The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William Lane Craig and James Porter Moreland, pp. 101–201 (Chichester, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

10. James A. Lindsay, Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly (Fareham, Hampshire, UK: Onus Books, 2013).

11. David Hilbert, “On the Infinite,” in Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. Paul Benacerraf and Hillary Putnam (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 139–41. Originally presented (in German) on June 24, 1925, before a congress of the Westphalian Mathematical Society, in honor of Karl Weierstrauss.

12. Lee Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

13. Erik Verlinde, “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” Journal of High Energy Physics, no. 4 (2011): 1–27; Thanu Padmanabhan, “Grappling with Gravity,” Scientific American India (January 2011): 31–35.

14. John Archibald Wheeler and Kenneth William Ford, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (New York: Norton, 1998).

15. Robert J. Nemiroff et al., “Bounds on Spectral Dispersion from Fermi-Detected Gamma Ray Bursts,” Physical Review Letters 108, no. 23 (2012): 231103.

16. Victor J. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), pp. 312–19; “A Scenario for the Natural Origin of the Universe,” Philo 9, no. 2 (2006): 93–102.

17. David Atkatz and Heinz Pagels, “Origin of the Universe as a Quantum Tunneling Event,” Physical Review Letters D 25 (1982): 2065–73.

18. David Atkatz, “Quantum Cosmology for Pedestrians,” American Journal of Physics 62, no. 7 (1994): 619–27.

19. Alexander Vilenkin, “Creation of Universes from Nothing,” Physics Letters B 117, no. 1 (1982): 25–28.

20. James B. Hartle and Stephen W. Hawking, “Wave Function of the Universe,” Physical Review D 28 (1983): 2960–75.

21. For those familiar with partial differential calculus, in Schrödinger wave mechanics the momentum component along the x-axis, px, is replaced by the differential that does not commute with x, from which the uncertainty principle can be derived. In Heisenberg's quantum mechanics, the observables are matrices. In Dirac's quantum mechanics, the observables are operators in linear vector space.

22. Bryce S. Dewitt, “Quantum Theory of Gravity. I. The Canonical Theory,” Physical Review 160 (1967): 1113–48.

23. Victor J. Stenger, Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000).

24. Christoph Schönborn, “Finding Design in Nature,” New York Times, July 7, 2005.

25. William Lane Craig, “Opening Speech,” in Is Faith in God Reasonable? ed. Paul Gould and Corey Miller (New York: Routledge, 2014).

26. Edward Robert Harrison, Masks of the Universe (New York London: Macmillan, Collier Macmillan, 1985), p. 252.

27. See, for example, Bernard Carr, ed., Universe or Multiverse? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); John Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse: Parallel Worlds, Hidden Dimensions, and the Ultimate Quest for the Frontiers of Reality (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010); Steven L. Manly, Visions of the Multiverse (Pompton Plains, NJ: New Page Books, 2011).

28. Alexander Vilenkin, “Birth of Inflationary Universes,” Physical Review D 27, no. 12 (1983): 2848–55. See also, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).

29. Andrei D. Linde, “Eternally Existing Self-Reproducing Chaotic Inflationary Universe,” Physics Letters B 175, no. 4 (1986): 395–400.

30. Andrei Linde, “The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American 271, no. 5 (1994): 48–55.

31. Aguirre and Gratton, “Steady-State Eternal Inflation”; Aguirre and Gratton, “Inflation without a Beginning.”

32. Craig, “Opening Speech.”

33. Sean M. Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (New York: Dutton, 2010), p. 355.

34. Planck Collaboration, P. A. R. Ade, et al., “Planck 2013 Results. XXIII. Isotropy and Statistics of the CMB,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.5083 (2013).

35. Albert Einstein, Max Born, and Hedwig Born, The Born-Einstein Letters: Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Max and Hedwig Born from 1916 to 1955, with Commentaries by Max Born (London: Macmillan, 1971).

36. David Bohm and B. J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London; New York: Routledge, 1993).

37. See my discussion in in Victor J. Stenger, The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995).

38. Hugh Everett III, “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,” Reviews of Modern Physics 29 (1957): 434–62.

39. Bryce S. DeWitt, Hugh Everett, and Neill Graham, The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: A Fundamental Exposition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes—and Its Implications (New York: Allen Lane, 1997).

40. Victor J. Stenger, Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000).

41. Leonard Susskind, Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), pp. 316–24; Raphael Bousso and Leonard Susskind, “Multiverse Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” Physical Review D 85, no. 4 (2012): 045007; Anthony Aguirre and Max Tegmark, “Born in an Infinite Universe: A Cosmological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” Physical Review D 84, no. 10 (2011): 105002.

42. Don N. Page and William K. Wootters, “Evolution without Evolution: Dynamics Described by Stationary Observables,” Physical Review D 27, no. 12 (1983): 2885.

43. William K. Wootters, “‘Time’ Replaced by Quantum Correlations,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 23, no. 8 (1984): 701–11.

44. Pierre Martinetti, “Emergence of Time in Quantum Gravity: Is Time Necessarily Flowing?” http://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.4995 (2012); J. Butterfield and C. J. Isham, “On the Emergence of Time in Quantum Gravity,” in The Arguments of Time, ed. J. Butterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 111–68.

45. Stenger, Timeless Reality.

46. Wootters, “‘Time’ Replaced by Quantum Correlations.”

47. Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

48. Tegmark, “Mathematical Universe.”

49. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), pp. 42–43.

50. Ibid., p. 46.

51. William Lane Craig, “Hawking and Mlodinow: Philosophical Undertakers,” 2013, http://www.reasonablefaith.org/hawking-and-mlodinow-philosophical-undertakers (accessed October 7, 2013).

52. Kirk D. Hagen, “Eternal Progression in a Multiverse: An Explorative Mormon Cosmology,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 39, no. 2 (2006): 1–45.

53. Hyrum Leslie Andrus, God, Man, and the Universe (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1968), p. 144.

54. Ibid., p. 146.

55. B. H. Roberts, New Witness for God (Salt Lake City, UT: George Q. Canon & Sons, 1898), p. 448.

56. Andrew Crumey, “Parallel Worlds,” 2013, http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/can-the-multiverse-explain-the-course-of-history/?utm_source=Aeon+newsletter&utm_campaign=9265966a75-Weekly_9_July_20137_26_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-9265966a75-68603881 (accessed September 6, 2013).

57. Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, a Novel (New York: Putnam, 1962).

58. Philip Roth, The Plot against America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).

59. Robert Cowley, ed., The Collected What If? (New York: Putnam, 1998).

60. As quoted in Crumey, “Parallel Worlds,” http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/can-the-multiverse-explain-the-course-of-history/?utm_source=Aeon+newsletter&utm_campaign=9265966a75-Weekly_9_July_20137_26_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-9265966a75-68603881 (accessed September 6, 2013).

61. For a discussion of the philosophy and history of the multiverse from a philosopher's viewpoint, see Mary-Jane. Rubenstein, Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

CHAPTER 16. LIFE AND GOD

  1. Exoplanet Team, The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, 2013, http://exoplanet.eu (accessed November 6, 2013).

  2. NASA Ames Research Center, “Kepler Discoveries,” 2013, http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/discoveries/ (accessed November 6, 2013).

  3. Erik A. Petigura, Andrew W. Howard, and Geoffrey W. Marcy, “Prevalence of Earth-Size Planets Orbiting Sun-like Stars,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 48 (2013): 19175–76.

  4. Seth Shostak, “The Numbers Are Astronomical,” 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-shostak/the-numbers-are-astronomi_b_4214484.html (accessed November 6, 2013).

  5. Alan H. Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), p. 186.

  6. John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  7. William Lane Craig, “The Craig-Pigliucci Debate: Does God Exist?” http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/craig-pigliucci2.html (accessed February 13, 2010).

  8. Victor J. Stenger, “The Universe Shows No Evidence for Design,” in Debating Christian Theism, ed. J. P. Moreland, Chad Meister, and Khaldoun A. Sweis (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 47–58.

  9. Robin Collins, “The Fine-Tuning Evidence Is Convincing,” in Debating Christian Theism, ed. J. P. Moreland, Chad Meister, and Khaldoun A. Sweis (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 35–46.

10. Victor J. Stenger, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011).

11. Hugh Ross, “Big Bang Model Refined by Fire,” in Mere Creation: Science, Faith & Intelligent Design, ed. William A. Dembski (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 1998), pp. 363–83.

12. Collins, “Fine-Tuning Evidence Is Convincing,” p. 38.

13. Rich Deem, “Evidence for the Fine Tuning of the Universe,” 2013, http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/designun.html (accessed July 12, 2013).

14. Robin Collins, “The Teleological Argument: An Exploration of the Fine-Tuning of the Universe,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William Lane Craig and James Porter Moreland (Chichester, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 43.

15. Steven Weinberg, “Living in the Multiverse,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. B. Carr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 2.

16. Leonard Susskind, Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (New York: Little, Brown, 2005).

17. M. Livio, D. Hollowell, A. Weiss, and J. W. Truran, “The Anthropic Significance of the Existence of an Excited State of C12,” Nature 340 (1989): 281–84; see also figure 9.1, p. 170, in Stenger, Fallacy of Fine-Tuning.

18. Robin Collins, “Teleological Argument.”

19. Barrow and Tipler, Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p. 326.

20. Stenger, Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, pp. 247–52.

21. Experts will point out that we technically cannot define a total energy of the universe for all geometries, although we can for a flat universe. In any case, we can argue that the average energy density is zero, counting gravity as negative, which allows the same conclusion: the universe came from a state of zero energy.

22. Collins, “Fine-Tuning Evidence Is Convincing,” p. 35.

23. Victor J. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006); Victor J. Stenger, “Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?” 2007, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3662/ (accessed August 21, 2013).

24. Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (New York: Free Press, 2012).

25. David Albert, “On the Origin of Everything,” New York Times, March 25, 2012.

26. Frank Wilczek, “The Cosmic Asymmetry between Matter and Antimatter,” Scientific American 243, no. 6 (1980): 82–90.

27. Marcus Chown, The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead: Dispatches from the Frontline of Science (London: Faber and Faber, 2007).

28. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), p. 180.

29. Ibid., p. 136.

30. Ibid., p. 164.

31. Victor J. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007).

32. For a grand tour of the full range of purported miracles and the personal investigations of the world's top paranormal investigator, see Joe Nickell, The Science of Miracles: Investigating the Incredible (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013).

33. Jerry Coyne, “Why Evolution Is True,” October 21, 2010, http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/115-years-of-debate-about-evidence-for-god/ (accessed August 19, 2013).

34. Victor J. Stenger, Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009).

35. Robert M. Price and Edwin A. Suiminen, Evolving out of Eden (Valley, WA: Tellectual, 2013).

36. Ewin MacAskill, “George Bush: ‘God Told Me to End the Tyranny in Iraq,’” 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa (accessed November 28, 2013).

37. Erik A. Petigura, Andrew W. Howard, and Geoffrey W. Marcy, “Prevalence of Earth-Size Planets Orbiting Sun-like Stars,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 48 (2013): 19175–76; Seth Shostak, “The Numbers Are Astronomical,”2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-shostak/the-numbers-are-astronomi_b_4214484.html (accessed November 6, 2013).

38. Alan H. Guth, The Inflationary Universe: the Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), p. 186.