We Need to Talk about Kelvin
What everyday things tell us about the universe
Marcus Chown
Faber & Faber, 2009
1. The Face in the Window
Young double-slit experiment.
Instantaneous Influence
Einstein, Rosen and Podolsky.
Alain Aspect.
The Theory of Relativity
— Galileo's Child, by Mitchell Feigenbaum.
2. Why Atoms Rock and Roll All Over the Place
p 48
De Broglie, in his thesis, did more than simply postulate
that particules of matter act like waves,
he spelled out how big those matter waves are.
Their size is inversely proportional to their momentum,
which is the product of a body's mass and its velocity.
3. No More than Two Peas in a Pod at a Time
4. We Need to Talk about Kelvin
5. You, Me and the Spectularly Unikely Triple-Alpha
6. The 4.5-Billion-Degree Furnace
7. The Unutterable Feebleness of Starlight
8. The Bang Before the Big One
The No-Boundary Measure
of the Universe, by James Harle, Stephen Hawkins and Thomas Hertog.
9. The Humpty Dumpty Tendency
Sources of the Observed
Thermodynamical Arrow, by L. S. Schulman.
10. Random Reality
p 194
Like it or not, we live in a random reality.
11. Earth's Full, Go Home
The code 6EQUJ5
on the Wow! printout.
Essays
Marc Girod