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213 Notes Chapter 1 1. CERN is the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research). It is located on the border between France and Switzerland, just west of Geneva. It is home to the Large Hadron Collider. 2. This formula is called the Euler beta function, after the eighteenth-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. See Veneziano,“Construction of a CrossingSymmetric , Regge-Behaved Amplitude for Linearly Rising Trajectories.” Henceforth , endnotes will cite the full name of technical articles in order to provide context . For all other texts, endnotes will only cite details sufficient for readers to refer to the bibliography. 3. See respectively: Nambu, “Quark Model and the Factorization of the Veneziano Amplitude”; Susskind, “Dual Symmetric Theory of Hadrons I”; and Nielsen, “An Almost Physical Interpretation of the Integrand of the N-Point Veneziano Model.” 4. This scale is known as the Planck scale, after the German physicist Max Planck. Of the Planck scale, John Schwarz writes: “one way that it is sometimes expressed is to say that the Planck scale is to the size of an atom as an atom is to the size of the solar system” (Superstrings 71). 5. John Brockman’s promotion of a “third culture” provides a contemporary example of the supposed “moral” authority of scientists in general: “The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are” (17). 6. In Dreams of a Final Theory, Steven Weinberg writes: “One common feature of everyone’s idea of reductionism is a sense of hierarchy, that some truths are less fundamental than others to which they may be reduced, as chemistry may be reduced to physics” (51). 7. I originally used this term in a 2007 essay entitled “Imagining Braneworlds in String Theory Technical Discourse.” Anneke Smelik also uses it in her edited collection, The Scientific Imaginary in Visual Culture, published in 2010. The book “explores the ways in which visual culture represents and remediates science” (9). 214 • Notes to Pages 4–12 While Smelik contends that the term “‘scientific imaginary’ . . . indicates that science has profound effects upon the imagination, and conversely, of the imagination in and upon science,” the emphasis is largely on the former. 8. Popularizations as a category also include semi-technical articles in magazines such as Scientific American, usually authored by journalists who specialize in writing about science, as well as articles by non-specialist journalists in mass media publications such as the New York Times or the Guardian. I will be focusing solely on monographs. 9. In some instances, mathematical formulae are incorporated into the text— what I call a semi-technical account; for example, Penrose’s The Road to Reality. Others include equations in endnotes or an appendix. But even so, by extracting these mathematical expressions from their original argumentative context, do they not lose their precise significance? Do they become what Robert Laughlin calls “baubles”? “All of us have a powerful instinct to collect things that are ‘interesting’ even when they are useless” (133, 136). 10. In the manuscript for her play String Fever, Jacquelyn Reingold also acknowledges Greene in particular. 11. Tensor algebra is an algebra that describes the relations between arrays of quantitative information bound to geometric spaces: in the case of general relativity , tensors of mass-energy density and space-time curvature. Riemannian geometry , unlike its predecessor, Euclidian geometry, allows for the articulation of spatial curvature. It was developed by the nineteenth-century German mathematician Bernhard Riemann. 12. In Hyperspace, Michio Kaku defines a field as “a collection of numbers defined at every point in space that completely describes a force at that point” (25). 13. In The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene describes space-time as a kind of “loaf” in order to illustrate how space-time may be “sliced” in different ways—an analogy that helps to clarify certain temporal paradoxes that arise with special relativity (138–39). 14. Velocity measures the motion of a body along a direction in space; or, in the internationally standard terms of measurement, meters per second. Momentum represents the product of rest mass and velocity. Acceleration measures the rate of increase in velocity with respect to time, as in, for example, a massive body falling to earth, measured as a constant acceleration of approximately 9.8 meters per second...

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