Ultimate Horizons: Probing the Limits of the Universe (The Frontiers Collection)
Language: English
Pages: 172
ISBN: 364241656X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the last hundred years, modern physics and cosmology have shown that there exist regions of the universe forever beyond our reach, hidden by truly ultimate horizons. Such regions exist in those remote parts of the universe where, from our point of view, space expands faster than the speed of light. They are found in black holes, where the gravity is strong enough to retain even light within its field of attraction. And in the realm of the very small, quarks must remain forever confined to their world of extreme density and can never be removed from it. The aim of this book is to describe these ultimate horizons, how they were discovered, how they shape our view of the world, and what clues we have about a world beyond them.
Fundamentals of Physics Extended (10th Edition)
Molecular Mechanics and Modeling
From Clockwork to Crapshoot: A History of Physics
The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
in 1916. Shortly after its publication, Schwarzschild died of a disease contracted as a German soldier at the Russian front in World War I. But his solution of Einstein’s equations provided the theoretical basis for black holes and their curious properties. Experienced from far away, the effect of a black hole is similar to that of any massive star; but the closer one gets, the stronger the distortion becomes, and beyond a certain distance from its center the force of gravity overcomes the power
sea. It has to be a pair, since the electric charge of empty space is zero, and adding energy will not change that; so after our creation process, it still has to be zero. If we are after bigger fish and want to produce a proton–antiproton pair, we need twice the proton mass, . So we have to pay by weight. At this point, quantum theory becomes essential. We will return to it in more detail in Chap. 5; here we only appeal to its perhaps most profound feature, the uncertainty principle, formulated
powerful accelerator in the world today, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, provides a collision energy of 7 TeV; a tera electron volt is one million million electron volts . Making charged particles, such as protons or electrons, move in a circular path causes them to emit electromagnetic radiation—we recall, that was one of the problems in determining the structure of atoms and eventually led to the advent of quantum mechanics. But here it means that the smaller the size of the
increased. Curiously enough, that question turns out to be more complicated than it sounds, and it does not even have a unique answer. If the increase of density is handled by the window decorator at the local fruit store and the balls are oranges, we all know the result. But that solution is reached only through orderly stacking, by the planning of the stallholder. In the end, each orange in the interior of the stack is surrounded by twelve other oranges. That this is the highest possible
allowed to break the inherent continuous symmetry of the laws governing the behavior of molecules in water vapor? How can ice break it? More generally, if the state of a system shows a certain symmetry at high temperatures, what happens to that symmetry when we lower the temperature and reach a new, less symmetric state; where does the symmetry go? We see here already that a topic of particular interest is the possible breaking of a symmetry for a system consisting of many constituents, such as
