Back before we encountered Professor Richard Muller’s claim that “According to [Einstein’s] general theory of relativity, the Sun does orbit the Earth. And the Earth orbits the Sun,” I was creating a series of do-it-yourself astronomy posts. (A list of the links is here.) Along the way, we rediscovered for ourselves one of the key laws of the planets: Kepler’s third law, which relates the time T it takes for a planet to orbit the Sun to its distance R from the Sun. Because we’ll be referring to this law and its variants so often, let me call it the “T|R law”. [For elliptical orbits, the correct choice of R is half the longest distance across the ellipse.] From this law we figured out how much acceleration is created by the Sun’s gravity, and concluded that it varies as 1/R2.
That wasn’t all. We also saw that objects that orbit the Earth — the Moon and the vast array of human-built satellites — satisfy their own T|R law, with the same general relationship. The only difference is that the acceleration created by the Earth’s gravity is less at the same distance than is the Sun’s. (We all secretly know that this is because the Earth has a smaller mass, though as avid do-it-yourselfers we admit we didn’t actually prove this yet.)
T|R laws are indeed found among any objects that (in the Newtonian sense) orbit a common planet. For example, this is true of the moons of Jupiter, as well as the rocks that make up Jupiter’s thin ring.
Along the way, we made a very important observation. We hadn’t (and still haven’t) succeeded in figuring out if the Earth goes round the Sun or the Sun goes round the Earth. But we did notice this:
This was all in a pre-Einsteinian context. But now Professor Muller comes along, and tells us Einstein’s conception of gravity implies that the Sun goes round the Earth just as much (or just as little) as the Earth goes round the Sun. And we have to decide whether to believe him.
We’re more than a week into a discussion of Professor Richard Muller’s claim that“According to the general theory of relativity, the Sun does orbit the Earth. And the Earth orbits the Sun. And they both orbit together around a place in between. And both the Sun and the Earth are orbiting the Moon.” Though many readers have made interesting and compelling attempts to prove the Earth orbits the Sun, none have yet been able to say why Muller is wrong.
A number of readers suggested, in one way or another, that we go far from the Sun and Earth and use the fact that out there, far from any complications, Newtonian physics should be good. From there, we can look back at the Sun and Earth, and see what’s going on in an unbiased way. Although Muller would say that you could still claim the Sun orbits the Earth by using “geocentric” coordinates centered on the Earth, these readers argued that such coordinates would not make sense in this distant, Newtonian region.
When we’re trying to figure out whether a confusing statement is really true or not, we have to speak precisely. Up to this stage, I haven’t been careful enough, and in this post, I’m going to try to improve upon that. There are a few small but significant points of clarification to make first. Then we’ll look in detail at what it means to “change coordinates” in such a way that would put the Sun in orbit around the Earth, instead of the other way round.
We’re all taught in school that the Earth goes round the Sun. But if you look around on the internet, you will find websites that say something quite different. There you will find the argument that Einstein’s great insights imply otherwise — that in fact the statements “The Earth goes round the Sun” and “The Sun goes round the Earth” are equally true, or equally false, or equally meaningless.
What’s his point? In Einstein’s theory of gravity (“general relativity”), time and three-dimensional space combine together to form a four-dimensional shape, called “space-time”, which is complex and curved. And in general relativity, you can choose whatever coordinates you want on this space-time.
So you are perfectly free to choose a set of coordinates, according to this point of view, in which the Earth is at the center of the solar system. In these coordinates, the Earth does not move, and the Sun goes round the Earth. The heliocentric picture of the planets and the Sun merely represents the simplest choice of coordinates; but there’s nothing wrong with choosing something else, as you like.
This is very much like saying that to use latitude and longitude on the Earth is just a choice. I could use whatever coordinates I want. The equator is special in the latitude-longitude system, since it lies at latitude=0; the poles are special too, at latitude +90 degrees and -90 degrees. But I could just as well choose a coordinate system in which the equator and poles don’t look special at all.
And so, after Einstein, the whole Copernican question — “is the solar system geocentric or heliocentric?” — is a complete red herring… much ado about nothing. As Muller argues in his article, “the revolution of Copernicus was actually a revolution in finding a simpler way to depict the motion, not a more correct way.“
Well? Is this true? If not, why not? Comments are open.
I hope you all had a good Twosday. Based on what I saw on social media, yesterday was celebrated widely in many parts of the world that use Pope Gregory’s calendar. I had two sandwiches to in honor of the date, and two scoops of ice cream.
In the United States, the joy continues today, it being now 2/23/22. Though not quite as wonderful as 2/22/22 on Tuesday, it’s still another nicely symmetric number worthy of note. In fact we get a full week of this, including 2/24/22 tomorrow, 2/25/22 on Friday, and so on, concluding on 2/29/22 … uhh, (oops) I mean, 2/28/22, because 2022 is not a Leap Year. For some reason.
In other countries, where it is 23/2/22, the celebration is over for now … because without symmetry, where’s the love? Ah, but they’re just more patient. They’ll get their chance in a month, when it’s 22/3/22, a date that will go unnoticed in the USA but not in Europe.
But what, exactly, are we getting so jazzed about? After all, what is the significance of it being the 22nd or 23rd date of the second month of a year labelled 2022? Every single bit of this is arbitrary. Somebody, long ago, decided January would be the first month, making February month number 2; but it wasn’t that long ago that March was the first month, which is why September, October, November and December (7, 8, 9, and 10) have their names. It’s arbitrary that January has 31 days instead of 30; had it been given thirty, the day we call the “22nd” would have been the “23rd” of February, and our celebration would have been one day earlier. And 2022 is arbitrary two too. Other perfectly good calendars referred to yesterday by a completely different day, month and year.
This, my friends, is exactly what General Relativity (and the rest of modern physics) tells you not to do. This is about putting all of your energies and your focus on your coordinate system — on how you represent reality, instead of on reality itself. The coordinate system is arbitrary; what matters is what actually happens, not how you describe what happens using some particular way of measuring time, or space, or anything else. To get excited about the numbers that happen to appear on your measuring stick is to put surface ahead of substance, math ahead of physics, magic ahead of science. It’s as bad as getting excited about how a word is spelled, or even what word is used to represent an object; a rose by any other name.
But we humans are not designed to think this way, it seems. We cheer when we’ve driven a thousand miles, a milestone (hah) which combines the definition of mile (arbitrary) with the fascination with the number 1,000 (which only looks like an interesting number if you count with ten fingers, rather than 12 knuckles, as the Babylonians did, or eight tentacles, as certain intelligent sea creatures might do.) We get terribly excited about numbers such as 88, or 666, which similarly depend on our having chosen to count on our ten fingers. A war was ended on 11/11 at 11:00 (and one was started on 22/2/22 — coincidence?)
Celebrating birthdays is a little better. No matter what calendar you choose, or whether it even lasts a year (as, for example, in Bali), the Sun appears to move across the sky, relative to the distant stars, in a yearly cycle. When it comes back to where it was, a year has passed. If we define your age to be the number of solar cycles you’ve experienced, then that means something, no matter what calendar you prefer. Your birthday means something too as long as we define it not by the arbitrary calendar but by the position of the Sun on the day of your birth.
Similarly, the solstices that mark the days with the shortest daylight and shortest darkness, and the equinoxes that have days and nights equal in duration, are independent of how you count hours or minutes or seconds, or even days. It doesn’t matter if your day has 24 equal hours, or if you divide your daylight into 12 and your darkness into 12, as used to be the case. It doesn’t matter what time zones you may have arbitrarily chosen. If you want to mark days, you can use the time that the Sun is highest in the sky to define “noon”, and count noons. A year is just over 365 noons, no matter what your calendar. The time from solstice to solstice is about half that. But the date we call “December 25th” does not sit on a similarly fundamental foundation; it shifts when there’s a leap year, and sometimes it’s three days after the solstice and sometimes four. Many other holidays, driven by Moon cycles rather than a Sun cycle, are even less grounded in the cosmos.
Being too focused on coordinates can cause a lot of trouble. The flat maps that try to describe our spherical Earth make all sorts of things seem to be true that aren’t. They all make the shortest path between two points impossible to guess. Some wildly exaggerate Greenland’s size and minimize the entire African continent. Most of them make it difficult to imagine what travel over the north or south pole is like, because there’s a sort of “coordinate singularity” there — a single point is spread out over a whole line at the top of the map, and similarly at the bottom, which makes places that are in fact very close together seem very far apart.
A coordinate singularity of a more subtle type prevented scientists (Einstein among them) from realizing for decades that black holes, which were once called “frozen stars,” have an interior, and that you could potentially fall in. The coordinates originally in use made it seem as though time would stop for someone reaching the edge of the star. Bad coordinates can obscure reality.
Physics, and science more generally, pushes us to focus on what really happens — on events whose existence does not depend on how we describe them. It’s a lesson that we humans don’t easily learn. While it’s fine to find a little harmless and silly joy at non-events such as 22/2/22 or 2/22/22, that’s as far as it should go: anything that depends on your particular and arbitrary choice of coordinate system cannot have any fundamental meaning. It’s a lesson from Einstein himself, advising us on what not two do.
It’s a busy time here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the US’s oldest urban Science Festival opens tomorrow for its 2015 edition. It has been 100 years since Einstein wrote his equations for gravity, known as his Theory of General Relativity, and so this year a significant part of the festival involves Celebrating Einstein. The festival kicks off tomorrow with a panel discussion of Einstein and his legacy near Harvard University — and I hope some of you can go! Here are more details:
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First Parish in Cambridge, 1446 Massachusetts Avenue, Harvard Square, Cambridge
Friday, April 17; 7:30pm-9:30pm
Officially kicking off the Cambridge Science Festival, four influential physicists will sit down to discuss how Einstein’s work shaped the world we live in today and where his influence will continue to push the frontiers of science in the future!
Our esteemed panelists include: Lisa Randall | Professor of Physics, Harvard University Priyamvada Natarajan | Professor of Astronomy & Physics, Yale University Clifford Will | Professor of Physics, University of Florida Peter Galison | Professor of History of Science, Harvard University David Kaiser | Professor of the History of Science, MIT
During that wild day or two following the announcement, a number of scientists stated that this was “the first direct observation of gravitational waves”. Others, including me, emphasized that this was an “indirect observation of gravitational waves.” I’m sure many readers noticed this discrepancy. Who was right?
No one was wrong, not on this point anyway. It was a matter of perspective. Since I think some readers would be interested to understand this point, here’s the story, and you can make your own judgment. (more…)
Did the universe begin with a singularity? A point in space and/or a moment in time where everything in the universe was crushed together, infinitely hot and infinitely densely packed?
Doesn’t the Big Bang Theory say so?
Well, let me ask you a question. Did you begin with a singularity?
Let’s see. Some decades ago, you were smaller. And then before that, you were even smaller. At some point you could fit inside your mother’s body, and if we follow time backwards, you were even much smaller than that.
If we follow your growth curve back, it would be very natural — if we didn’t know anything about biology, cells, and human reproduction — to assume that initially you were infinitesimally small… that you were created from a single point!
But that would be wrong. The mistake is obvious — it doesn’t make sense to assume that the period of rapid growth that you went through as a tiny embryo was the simple continuation of a process that extends on and on into the past, back until you were infinitely small. Instead, there was a point where something changed… the growth began not from a point but from a single object of definite size: a fertilized egg.
The notion that the Universe started with a Big Bang, and that this Big Bang started from a singularity — a point in space and/or a moment in time where the universe was infinitely hot and dense — is not that different, really, from assuming humans begin their lives as infinitely small eggs. It’s about over-extrapolating into the past. (more…)
First things first. As with all major claims of discovery, considerable caution is advised until the BICEP2 measurement has been verified by some other experiment. Moreover, even if the measurement is correct, one should not assume that the interpretation in terms of gravitational waves and inflation is correct; this requires more study and further confirmation.
The media is assuming BICEP2’s measurement is correct, and that the interpretation in terms of inflation is correct, but leading scientists are not so quick to rush to judgment, and are thinking things through carefully. Scientists are cautious not just because they’re trained to be thoughtful and careful but also because they’ve seen many claims of discovery withdrawn or discredited; discoveries are made when humans go where no one has previously gone, with technology that no one has previously used — and surprises, mistakes, and misinterpretations happen often.
But in this post, I’m going to assumeassumeassume that BICEP2’s results are correct, or essentially correct, and are being correctly interpreted. Let’s assume that [here’s a primer on yesterday’s result that defines these terms]
they really have detected “B-mode polarization” in the “CMB” [Cosmic Microwave Background, the photons (particles of light) that are the ancient, cool glow leftover from the Hot Big Bang]
that this B-mode polarization really is a sign of gravitational waves generated during a brief but dramatic period of cosmic inflation that immediately preceded the Hot Big Bang,
Then — IF BICEP2’s results were basically right and were being correctly interpreted concerning inflation — what would be the implications?
In my last post, I expressed the view that a particle accelerator with proton-proton collisions of (roughly) 100 TeV of energy, significantly more powerful than the currently operational Large Hadron Collider [LHC] that helped scientists discover the Higgs particle, is an obvious and important next steps in our process of learning about the elementary workings of nature. And I described how we don’t yet know whether it will be an exploratory machine or a machine with a clear scientific target; it will depend on what the LHC does or does not discover over the coming few years.
What will it mean, for the 100 TeV collider project and more generally, if the LHC, having made possible the discovery of the Higgs particle, provides us with no more clues? Specifically, over the next few years, hundreds of tests of the Standard Model (the equations that govern the known particles and forces) will be carried out in measurements made by the ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments at the LHC. Suppose that, as it has so far, the Standard Model passes every test that the experiments carry out? In particular, suppose the Higgs particle discovered in 2012 appears, after a few more years of intensive study, to be, as far the LHC can reveal, a Standard Model Higgs — the simplest possible type of Higgs particle?
Before we go any further, let’s keep in mind that we already know that the Standard Model isn’t all there is to nature. The Standard Model does not provide a consistent theory of gravity, nor does it explain neutrino masses, dark matter or “dark energy” (also known as the cosmological constant). Moreover, many of its features are just things we have to accept without explanation, such as the strengths of the forces, the existence of “three generations” (i.e., that there are two heavier cousins of the electron, two for the up quark and two for the down quark), the values of the masses of the various particles, etc. However, even though the Standard Model has its limitations, it is possible that everything that can actually be measured at the LHC — which cannot measure neutrino masses or directly observe dark matter or dark energy — will be well-described by the Standard Model. What if this is the case?
Michelson and Morley, and What They Discovered
In science, giving strong evidence that something isn’t there can be as important as discovering something that is there — and it’s often harder to do, because you have to thoroughly exclude all possibilities. [It’s very hard to show that your lost keys are nowhere in the house — you have to convince yourself that you looked everywhere.] A famous example is the case of Albert Michelson, in his two experiments (one in 1881, a second with Edward Morley in 1887) trying to detect the “ether wind”.
Light had been shown to be a wave in the 1800s; and like all waves known at the time, it was assumed to be a wave in something material, just as sound waves are waves in air, and ocean waves are waves in water. This material was termed the “luminiferous ether”. As we can detect our motion through air or through water in various ways, it seemed that it should be possible to detect our motion through the ether, specifically by looking for the possibility that light traveling in different directions travels at slightly different speeds. This is what Michelson and Morley were trying to do: detect the movement of the Earth through the luminiferous ether.
Both of Michelson’s measurements failed to detect any ether wind, and did so expertly and convincingly. And for the convincing method that he invented — an experimental device called an interferometer, which had many other uses too — Michelson won the Nobel Prize in 1907. Meanwhile the failure to detect the ether drove both FitzGerald and Lorentz to consider radical new ideas about how matter might be deformed as it moves through the ether. Although these ideas weren’t right, they were important steps that Einstein was able to re-purpose, even more radically, in his 1905 equations of special relativity.
In Michelson’s case, the failure to discover the ether was itself a discovery, recognized only in retrospect: a discovery that the ether did not exist. (Or, if you’d like to say that it does exist, which some people do, then what was discovered is that the ether is utterly unlike any normal material substance in which waves are observed; no matter how fast or in what direction you are moving relative to me, both of us are at rest relative to the ether.) So one must not be too quick to assume that a lack of discovery is actually a step backwards; it may actually be a huge step forward.
Epicycles or a Revolution?
There were various attempts to make sense of Michelson and Morley’s experiment. Some interpretations involved tweaks of the notion of the ether. Tweaks of this type, in which some original idea (here, the ether) is retained, but adjusted somehow to explain the data, are often referred to as “epicycles” by scientists. (This is analogous to the way an epicycle was used by Ptolemy to explain the complex motions of the planets in the sky, in order to retain an earth-centered universe; the sun-centered solar system requires no such epicycles.) A tweak of this sort could have been the right direction to explain Michelson and Morley’s data, but as it turned out, it was not. Instead, the non-detection of the ether wind required something more dramatic — for it turned out that waves of light, though at first glance very similar to other types of waves, were in fact extraordinarily different. There simply was no ether wind for Michelson and Morley to detect.
If the LHC discovers nothing beyond the Standard Model, we will face what I see as a similar mystery. As I explained here, the Standard Model, with no other particles added to it, is a consistent but extraordinarily “unnatural” (i.e. extremely non-generic) example of a quantum field theory. This is a big deal. Just as nineteenth-century physicists deeply understood both the theory of waves and many specific examples of waves in nature and had excellent reasons to expect a detectable ether, twenty-first century physicists understand quantum field theory and naturalness both from the theoretical point of view and from many examples in nature, and have very good reasons to expect particle physics to be described by a natural theory. (Our examples come both from condensed matter physics [e.g. metals, magnets, fluids, etc.] and from particle physics [e.g. the physics of hadrons].) Extremely unnatural systems — that is, physical systems described by quantum field theories that are highly non-generic — simply have not previously turned up in nature… which is just as we would expect from our theoretical understanding.
[Experts: As I emphasized in my Santa Barbara talk last week, appealing to anthropic arguments about the hierarchy between gravity and the other forces does not allow you to escape from the naturalness problem.]
So what might it mean if an unnatural quantum field theory describes all of the measurements at the LHC? It may mean that our understanding of particle physics requires an epicyclic change — a tweak. The implications of a tweak would potentially be minor. A tweak might only require us to keep doing what we’re doing, exploring in the same direction but a little further, working a little harder — i.e. to keep colliding protons together, but go up in collision energy a bit more, from the LHC to the 100 TeV collider. For instance, perhaps the Standard Model is supplemented by additional particles that, rather than having masses that put them within reach of the LHC, as would inevitably be the case in a natural extension of the Standard Model (here’s an example), are just a little bit heavier than expected. In this case the world would be somewhat unnatural, but not too much, perhaps through some relatively minor accident of nature; and a 100 TeV collider would have enough energy per collision to discover and reveal the nature of these particles.
Or perhaps a tweak is entirely the wrong idea, and instead our understanding is fundamentally amiss. Perhaps another Einstein will be needed to radically reshape the way we think about what we know. A dramatic rethink is both more exciting and more disturbing. It was an intellectual challenge for 19th century physicists to imagine, from the result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, that key clues to its explanation would be found in seeking violations of Newton’s equations for how energy and momentum depend on velocity. (The first experiments on this issue were carried out in 1901, but definitive experiments took another 15 years.) It was an even greater challenge to envision that the already-known unexplained shift in the orbit of Mercury would also be related to the Michelson-Morley (non)-discovery, as Einstein, in trying to adjust Newton’s gravity to make it consistent with the theory of special relativity, showed in 1913.
My point is that the experiments that were needed to properly interpret Michelson-Morley’s result
did not involve trying to detect motion through the ether,
did not involve building even more powerful and accurate interferometers,
and were not immediately obvious to the practitioners in 1888.
This should give us pause. We might, if we continue as we are, be heading in the wrong direction.
Difficult as it is to do, we have to take seriously the possibility that if (and remember this is still a very big “if”) the LHC finds only what is predicted by the Standard Model, the reason may involve a significant reorganization of our knowledge, perhaps even as great as relativity’s re-making of our concepts of space and time. Were that the case, it is possible that higher-energy colliders would tell us nothing, and give us no clues at all. An exploratory 100 TeV collider is not guaranteed to reveal secrets of nature, any more than a better version of Michelson-Morley’s interferometer would have been guaranteed to do so. It may be that a completely different direction of exploration, including directions that currently would seem silly or pointless, will be necessary.
This is not to say that a 100 TeV collider isn’t needed! It might be that all we need is a tweak of our current understanding, and then such a machine is exactly what we need, and will be the only way to resolve the current mysteries. Or it might be that the 100 TeV machine is just what we need to learn something revolutionary. But we also need to be looking for other lines of investigation, perhaps ones that today would sound unrelated to particle physics, or even unrelated to any known fundamental question about nature.
Let me provide one example from recent history — one which did not lead to a discovery, but still illustrates that this is not all about 19th century history.
An Example
One of the great contributions to science of Nima Arkani-Hamed, Savas Dimopoulos and Gia Dvali was to observe (in a 1998 paper I’ll refer to as ADD, after the authors’ initials) that no one had ever excluded the possibility that we, and all the particles from which we’re made, can move around freely in three spatial dimensions, but are stuck (as it were) as though to the corner edge of a thin rod — a rod as much as one millimeter wide, into which only gravitational fields (but not, for example, electric fields or magnetic fields) may penetrate. Moreover, they emphasized that the presence of these extra dimensions might explain why gravity is so much weaker than the other known forces.
Fig. 1: ADD’s paper pointed out that no experiment as of 1998 could yet rule out the possibility that our familiar three-dimensional world is a corner of a five-dimensional world, where the two extra dimensions are finite but perhaps as large as a millimeter.
Given the incredible number of experiments over the past two centuries that have probed distances vastly smaller than a millimeter, the claim that there could exist millimeter-sized unknown dimensions was amazing, and came as a tremendous shock — certainly to me. At first, I simply didn’t believe that the ADD paper could be right. But it was.
One of the most important immediate effects of the ADD paper was to generate a strong motivation for a new class of experiments that could be done, rather inexpensively, on the top of a table. If the world were as they imagined it might be, then Newton’s (and Einstein’s) law for gravity, which states that the force between two stationary objects depends on the distance r between them as 1/r², would increase faster than this at distances shorter than the width of the rod in Figure 1. This is illustrated in Figure 2.
Fig. 2: If the world were as sketched in Figure 1, then Newton/Einstein’s law of gravity would be violated at distances shorter than the width of the rod in Figure 1. The blue line shows Newton/Einstein’s prediction; the red line shows what a universe like that in Figure 1 would predict instead. Experiments done in the last few years agree with the blue curve down to a small fraction of a millimeter.
These experiments are not easy — gravity is very, very weak compared to electrical forces, and lots of electrical effects can show up at very short distances and have to be cleverly avoided. But some of the best experimentalists in the world figured out how to do it (see here and here). After the experiments were done, Newton/Einstein’s law was verified down to a few hundredths of a millimeter. If we live on the corner of a rod, as in Figure 1, it’s much, much smaller than a millimeter in width.
But it could have been true. And if it had, it might not have been discovered by a huge particle accelerator. It might have been discovered in these small inexpensive experiments that could have been performed years earlier. The experiments weren’t carried out earlier mainly because no one had pointed out quite how important they could be.
Ok Fine; What Other Experiments Should We Do?
So what are the non-obvious experiments we should be doing now or in the near future? Well, if I had a really good suggestion for a new class of experiments, I would tell you — or rather, I would write about it in a scientific paper. (Actually, I do know of an important class of measurements, and I have written a scientific paper about them; but these are measurements to be done at the LHC, and don’t involve a entirely new experiment.) Although I’m thinking about these things, I do not yet have any good ideas. Until I do, or someone else does, this is all just talk — and talk does not impress physicists.
Indeed, you might object that my remarks in this post have been almost without content, and possibly without merit. I agree with that objection.
Still, I have some reasons for making these points. In part, I want to highlight, for a wide audience, the possible historic importance of what might now be happening in particle physics. And I especially want to draw the attention of young people. There have been experts in my field who have written that non-discoveries at the LHC constitute a “nightmare scenario” for particle physics… that there might be nothing for particle physicists to do for a long time. But I want to point out that on the contrary, not only may it not be a nightmare, it might actually represent an extraordinary opportunity. Not discovering the ether opened people’s minds, and eventually opened the door for Einstein to walk through. And if the LHC shows us that particle physics is not described by a natural quantum field theory, it may, similarly, open the door for a young person to show us that our understanding of quantum field theory and naturalness, while as intelligent and sensible and precise as the 19th century understanding of waves, does not apply unaltered to particle physics, and must be significantly revised.
Of course the LHC is still a young machine, and it may still permit additional major discoveries, rendering everything I’ve said here moot. But young people entering the field, or soon to enter it, should not assume that the experts necessarily understand where the field’s future lies. Like FitzGerald and Lorentz, even the most brilliant and creative among us might be suffering from our own hard-won and well-established assumptions, and we might soon need the vision of a brilliant young genius — perhaps a theorist with a clever set of equations, or perhaps an experimentalist with a clever new question and a clever measurement to answer it — to set us straight, and put us onto the right path.
