Our cosmic habitat

Our Cosmic Habitat

Volumn , Issue , 2011, Pages

  Rees, Martin ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84883971763     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (14)

1. This particular quotation from Lord Kelvin (then William Thomson) is from Macmillan's Magazine (5 March 1862), p. 288; he repeated his argument in several later articles.
2. These instruments would consist of four or five telescopes in space, arrayed as an interferometer so that the light from the star itself cancels out by interference (the peaks of waves from one telescope neutralizing the troughs from the other) and won't drown out the light from any (far fainter) planet.
3. The quote is from Lemaître's popular book, The Primordial Atom (Kluwer, 1953).
4. The quote is from J. A.Wheeler, American Scientist 56, 1 (1968).
5. Quoted from a 1975 lecture by S. Chandrasekhar, reprinted in Truth and Beauty (University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 54.
6. Penrose's views on black holes and on other issues quoted here, are summarized in his book The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford University Press, 1988).
7. The quote is from an article by J. Ostriker and P. Steinhart in Scientific American, January 2001.
8. These heavy-ion experiments are the ones that have triggered the unease (mentioned in chapter 8) regarding the risk of a runaway conversion of everything into strange matter.
9. The quantitative implications of the Oklo reactor for the constancy of various physical "constants" were reviewed and improved by F. J. Dyson and T. Damour in Nuclear Physics B480 (1996): 37-54. This article gives reference to earlier work.
10. A classic exposition of this viewpoint is Philip Anderson's "More Is different," Science 177 (1972): 393-96.
11. See Steven Weinberg's Dreams of a Final Theory (Pantheon, 1993).
12. In Advice to a Young Scientist by P.Medawar (Oxford University Press, 1979).
13. The quote is from John Polkinghorne, Quarks, Chaos and Christianity (SPCK Triangle Press, 1994).
14. Before Smolin's conjecture can be checked, he needs to make it more specific, particularly in spelling out the precise definition of "optimum." For instance, should the rate of formation, the space density, or the total number of holes in a universe be optimized?