Primack,+Joel

=Primack, Joel=

toc Read here pertinent facts about someone whose work is critical to a proper comprehension of scale.

=Biography= Dr. Joel R. Primack is a physicist who helped create what is now called the "Standard Model" of particle physics.

In matters of scale, Primack is significant as he was one of the main advisors for the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum's 1996 IMAX film Cosmic Voyage, and he is now working with leading planetariums to help make the invisible universe visible. In addition to more than 200 technical articles in professional journals, Primack has written a number of articles aimed at a more popular audience. These include articles in the World Book Encyclopedia and in publications such as Astronomy, Beam Line, California Wild, Sky and Telescope, and in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and the Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics. With Nancy Abrams, he is the author of The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos (Riverhead/Penguin, 2006) and The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World (Yale University Press, 2011).

=Writings By Primack=

Below is an excerpt on Primack's article about Glashow's Ouroboros:

From the Planck scale to the cosmic horizon, the visible universe encompasses about 60 orders of magnitude. The size scales of the universe can thus be arrayed around the serpent like minutes around the face of a clock. Sheldon Glashow originally suggested this symbol, with the swallowing of the tail expressing his hope for a unification of the theories governing the largest and smallest scales [8]. I noticed [9] that there are many connections across the diagram: electromagnetism dominates the bottom; the strong and weak interactions not only dominate on nuclear scales but also describe energy generation in stars and determine the composition of planetary systems; and dark matter, which is gravitationally dominant on galactic and larger scales, may be associated with the physics of still smaller scales. The Cosmic Uroboros represents the universe as a continuity of vastly different size scales, of which the largest and smallest may be linked by gravity. Sixty orders of magnitude separate the very smallest from the very largest. Traveling around the serpent from head to tail, we move from the scale of the cosmic horizon to that of a galaxy supercluster, a single galaxy, the solar system, the sun, the moon, a mountain, a human, a single-celled creature, a strand of DNA, an atom, a nucleus, the scale of the weak interactions, and approaching the tail the extremely small size scales on which physicists hope to find evidence for Supersymmetry (SUSY), dark matter particles such as the axion, and a Grand Unified Theory. There are other connections between large and small: electromagnetic forces are most important from the scale of atoms to that of mountains; strong and weak forces govern both atomic nuclei and stars; cosmic inflation may have created the large-scale of the universe out of quantum-scale fluctuations. Why is this symbol useful? People asked to visualize "the universe" will far more often think of the largest thing they know of than the smallest. Few realize that the universe exists on all scales, everywhere, all the time. This is a truly extravagant thought. Largeness is by no means the most important characteristic of the universe. Focusing on it makes people feel small, not because they are, but because they are simply ignoring all scales smaller than themselves in thinking about the universe. On the Cosmic Uroboros, as I call it, if the mouth swallowing the tail is drawn at the top, humans (at one meter or so) fall more or less at the bottom -- i.e., at the center of all the size scales in the visible universe. Many students are so stunned by this apparently special place that they refuse to believe it and insist it must be a result of some tricky choice of units. I don't know if the center of the Cosmic Uroboros is in fact special, but finding themselves there certainly strikes a chord with most people. Perhaps it hearkens back to the soul-satisfying cosmology of the Middle Ages, where earth was truly the center of the universe. ... Image: Glashow’s Snake rendered by Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack, (c) Abrams, Primack 2006

Midgard spans about fourteen orders of magnitude, from 10^-2 cm to 1012 cm, holding everything for which people have intuition. The figure also shows the approximate decade and technology by which scientists discovered the rest of the Cosmic Uroboros. The concept of Midgard has implications. People disagree on just about everything that has to do with spirituality, but the one thing they do tend to agree on is that whatever the spiritual may be, it’s not physical. Midgard, however, helps us understand why this “physical/spiritual” dichotomy is an illusion. Backing up a bit, in medieval cosmology heaven was understood to be physically enveloping the sphere of the fixed stars at a finite distance away from Earth (so close that in Dante’s Paradiso it was possible from the height of Paradise to see the shoreline from Asia to Cadiz). But after medieval cosmology was overthrown by the Newtonian picture, space was understood to go on forever, leaving no geographical location for heaven. God was said to be “outside the universe” or “in the heart.” Today most people still have the idea that the spiritual, if it exists at all, is mysteriously other than the physical or material world and “transcends” the physical universe. The concept of Midgard erases this, not by telling us what the spiritual is, but what the physical is. Very large and very small structures on the Cosmic Uroboros are not physical in the usual sense of the term. Superclusters of galaxies are expanding apart and in billions of years will disperse; they’re not bound together by gravity but by our dot-connecting minds. In the opposite direction from Midgard toward the very small, there are elementary particles that are not really “physical” particles but rather quantum mechanical ones that are routinely in two or more places at once. The strange truth is that what we usually think of as “physical” is a property of Midgard, perhaps the defining property, and thus Midgard is what people generally think of as the “physical” universe. Beyond Midgard, however, lies most of the Cosmic Uroboros.

=Links and Citations=

Official bio: @http://scipp.ucsc.edu/personnel/profiles/primack.html