1 “The multiple universe idea severely limits”: Comments by Alan Guth made in interviews with the author on May 9, 2011, and July 28, 2011.
2 “We now find ourselves at a historic fork”: Comments by Steven Weinberg made in interview with the author on July 28, 2011.
3 “To get our universe”: Francis Collins, 31st annual Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University, June 16, 2011, quoted in the Christian Post, June 21, 2011.
4 “This is not your father’s universe”: Robert Kirshner, National Science Foundation (NSF) Symposium, “Ground Based Astronomy in the 21st Century,” Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, DC, October 7–8, 2003.
1 a photograph of the coast near Pacifica, California: Photograph of Pacifica, California, available at http://miraimages.photoshelter.com/image/I0000dJXI5vwD7QQ.
2 “But I am constant as the northern star”: William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III, i, 60–62.
3 According to astrophysical calculations: For the astrophysical calculations of very long time scales in the universe, see Freeman Dyson, “Time Without End,” Reviews of Modern Physics 51, no. 3 (July 1979): 447–60.
4 “Impermanent are all component things”: Digha Nikaya, Mahaparinibbana Sutta, trans. Sister Vajira and Francis Story (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publications Society, 1998), p.16.
5 “A man can do what he wants”: Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will (1839): “Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.”
PART I
1 “Theater has always been about religion”: Comments by Alan Brody made in interview with the author, July 10, 2011.
2 See, for example, God’s Activity in the World: God’s Activity in the World: The Contemporary Problem, ed. Owen Thomas (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983).
3 see, for example, Charles Hodge: Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (1871–73; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999).
4 A recent study by the Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund: Elaine Howard Ecklund, Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
5 “I’ve not had a problem”: Francis Collins, Newsweek, December 20, 2010.
6 “The universe exists because of God’s actions”: Ian Hutchinson, interview with the author, July 7, 2011.
7 “I believe that our physical universe is somehow wrapped”: Owen Gingerich, interview with the author, July 7, 2011.
8 “We should try to love the questions themselves”: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M. D. Herter Norton, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), letter 4, July 16, 1903.
9 “Faith is the great cop-out”: Richard Dawkins, speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, April 15, 1992, published in The Independent, April 20, 1992.
10 “Many of us saw religion”: Richard Dawkins, The Guardian, October 11, 2001.
PART II
11 “Were one to characterize religion”: William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; BiblioBazaar, 2007), p. 60.
12 “I remember the night”: Ibid., p. 71.
13 “Our impulsive belief is here always”: Ibid., p. 77.
14 as beautifully described in the book Personal Knowledge: Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
15 “the rest from Man or Angel”: John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VIII. See, for instance, vol. 4 of the Harvard Classics edition (Cambridge, MA, 1909–14), p. 245.
1 “We’re reaching into the fabric of the universe”: Joe Incandela, quoted in Paul Rincon, “Higgs Boson-Like Particle Discovery Claimed at LHC,” BBC News, July 4, 2012. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-18702455.
2 “Symmetry principles have moved to a new level”: Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1992), pp. 142, 165.
3 Experiments published in 2004: I. Rodriguez et al., “Symmetry Is in the Eye of the Beeholder: Innate Preference for Bilateral Symmetry in Flower-Naive Bumblebees,” Naturwissenschaften 91 (2004): 374–77.
4 “A sense of beauty has been declared”: Charles Darwin, “Sense of Beauty,” in The Descent of Man (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871), p. 61.
5 “However we analyse the difference”: E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order, 2nd ed. (London: Phaidon, 1984), p. 9.
1 “That little red dot is hellishly far away”: This and subsequent comments from Garth Illingworth made in interview with the author on February 11, 2012.
2 A clay tablet dating from the twenty-fifth century BC: See James D. Muhly, “Ancient Cartography: Man’s Earliest Attempts to Represent His World,” available at http://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDFs/20-2/Ancient%20Cartography.pdf. Also see “History of Cartography,” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cartography.
3 “Man is fallen; nature is erect”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature.” See, for instance, vol. 5 of the Harvard Classics edition (Cambridge, MA, 1909–14), p. 228.
4 The totality of living matter on Earth: Earth’s mass is 6 × 1027 grams. The biomass on Earth is about 6 × 1017 grams. See, for instance, William B. Whitman, David C. Coleman, and William J. Wiebe, “Prokaryotes: The Unseen Majority,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95, no. 12 (1998): 6578–83. To get the fraction of living mass in the visible cosmos, I assume that our star is an average star with a mass of 2 × 1033 grams. And I assume that 3 percent of all stars have habitable planets attached.
1 “If a man proceeded by force”: O. R. Gurney and S. N. Kramer, “Two Fragments of Sumerian Laws,” Assyrio-logical Studies, no. 16 (April 21, 1965): 13–19. See also “Code of Ur-Nammu,” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu.
2 “I personally do not want”: Maria Spiropulu, quoted in Dennis Overbye, “Physicists Find Elusive Particle Seen as Key to Universe,” New York Times, July 4, 2012.
3 “This terror of mind”: Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. and ed. W. H. D. Rouse and M. F. Smith, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), Book I, lines 146–58.
4 “mist and smoke disperse”: Ibid., Book III, lines 136–39.
5 “Therefore, death is nothing to us”: Ibid., Book III, line 830.
6 “I believe that our physical universe is somehow wrapped”: Owen Gingerich, interview with the author, July 7, 2011.
7 “Any body wholly or partially immersed”: Archimedes, “On Floating Bodies.” See www.archive.org/stream/worksofarchimede00arch#page/256/mode/2up.
8 the Persian physicist Ibn Sahl: See “The First Steps for Learning Optics: Ibn Sahl’s, Al-Haytham’s and Young’s Works on Refraction as Typical Examples,” in Mourad Zghal et al., Education and Training in Optics and Photonics, OSA Technical Digest series (Optical Society of America, 2007). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Sahl and also http://spie.org/etop/2007/etop07fundamentalsII.pdf.
9 “mere mechanical causes”: Isaac Newton, The Principia, vol. 2, trans. I. Bernard Cohen et al. (1687; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 544–45.
10 “Motion is much more apt to be lost”: Isaac Newton, Optiks (1704), Book III, Part 1. See, for instance, Great Books of the Western World, vol. 34 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 540 and 542.
11 “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là”: Pierre-Simon Laplace, quoted in Augustus De Morgan, “On Some Philosophical Atheists,” in A Budget of Paradoxes, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Greens, 1872). See also http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Budget_of_Paradoxes/J.
12 “Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen”: Pauli Archive, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. For the original letter, see http://www.library.ethz.ch/exhibit/pauli/neutrino_e.html and the translation into English at http://www.pp.rhul.ac.uk/~ptd/TEACHING/PH2510/pauli-letter.html.
13 In their excellent book Wonders and the Order of Nature: Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1998).
14 “the passion of surprise and wonder”: David Hume, “Of Miracles,” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). See for example the Harvard Classics edition, vol. 37 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1909–14), p. 404.
15 “Curiosity pleases me”: Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Interviews (1961–84), trans. John Johnston, ed. Sylvere Lotinger (New York: Semiotext[e], 1989), pp. 198–99.
16 “It is the mundo of the imagination”: Wallace Stevens, “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), p. 58.
17 Or the recent Pew survey: Pew Research Center Forum on Religion and Public Life, December 2009, http://www.pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/Many-Americans-Mix-Multiple-Faiths.aspx#5.
18 “In living nature”: Jöns Jacob Berzelius, translated and quoted in Henry M. Leicester, “Berzelius,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner’s, 1981), p. 96a.
19 “[T]his gentleman will at once expound to you”: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864), trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp. 21–22, 30–31.
20 “The most beautiful experience”: Albert Einstein, “The World as I See It” Forum and Century 84 (1931): 193–94; reprinted in Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Modern Library, 1994), p. 11.
1 the first direct proof that the Earth spins on its axis: Prior to Foucault’s pendulum, there was only indirect, nonlocal evidence that the Earth rotates. In 1736–37, Pierre-Louis Maupertuis measured the shape of the poles of the Earth and showed that they are flattened relative to a perfect sphere, and in the 1740s, Charles Marie de La Condamine and Pierre Bouguer measured the equatorial regions of Earth and showed that they bulged relative to a perfect sphere. These altered shapes occur when a nonrigid sphere rotates.
2 His journal from that period reads: Foucault’s journal entries can be found in William Tobin, The Life and Science of Léon Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 139.
3 dismissed as “soft, timid, and puny”: See The Life and Science of Léon Foucault, pp. 15 and 18, and references therein.
4 “You are invited to see the Earth turn”: Terrien, Le National, February 19, 1851. See also Tobin, The Life and Science of Léon Foucault, p. 141.
5 “At the appointed hour”: Terrien, Le National, February 19, 1851.
6 “It’s of no use whatsoever”: David G. Luenberger, Information Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 355. See also Heinrich Hertz, Electric Waves, trans. D. E. Jones (1900; New York: Dover, 1962).
7 “We find ourselves here on the very path”: Niels Bohr, Nature Supplement, April 14, 1928.
8 In a Nielsen mobile phone survey: Marguerite Reardon, “Americans Text More Than They Talk,” at http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10048257-94.html.
9 According to a Pew survey: The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, April 26–May 22, 2011, Spring Tracking Survey.
10 “I use e-mail to make appointments”: Leonara in Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (New York: Basic Books, 2011), p. 189.
11 “We do not ride the railroad”: Henry David Thoreau, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” in Walden (1854; New York: W. W. Norton, 1951), p. 109.