Last Wednesday I dropped my parents and brother off at the airport, after having them here for a few weeks, including a fun trip to Virginia with my in-laws over Thanksgiving. My how things have backed up over this period!
One of the many bloggable things that occurred during my family’s visit was Lisa Randall’s appearance on campus to deliver one of our celebrated University Lectures. As a University Lecturer, Lisa follows in an illustrious tradition, including such speakers as Steven Pinker, Salman Rushdie, Richard Leakey, Rem Koolhaas, David McCullough, Paul Krugman, Tobias Wolff and Maya Lin. I love this series and it is particularly fun when a friend turns out to be the speaker. Lisa’s talk was based on her book – Warped Passages – and was a terrific popular-level description of the idea of extra dimensions and their applications in modern particle physics.
This is not an easy subject to make accessible at a general level; I found it hard enough recently doing it for a scientifically trained, but non-physicist audience, never mind a general educated one. But Lisa did a wonderful job, focusing on warped extra dimensions (as one might expect) and getting across the main motivations, ideas and consequences. While string theory was given its proper recognition for providing motivations for the Randall-Sundrum constructions, Lisa didn’t focus on that, and instead presented the idea mainly as a phenomenological construction. I thought this worked very well and allowed the audience to focus on the more immediate applications and testable aspects of the models without throwing up the many other questions that go along with string theory.
Earlier that afternoon we had Lisa over to the department for a discussion on extra dimensions, which ended up as a long and detailed chat with my colleagues Kaustubh Agashe, Cristian Armendariz-Picon and me. This was great, and I certainly learned a lot about the most recent work on this topic. Part of my work is in this area, but there are so many interesting avenues being explored that it is hard to keep up with the literature and it is always useful to hear what’s going on from someone involved in some of the aspects one is not working on.
After her talk there was time for Lisa and I to grab a couple of glasses of wine at Ohm Lounge. I have known Lisa for quite a long time, since I was a postdoc at MIT back when she was a faculty member there, but this is the first time we’ve managed to get together in Syracuse and it was great fun to have her here.
After a busy semester, Thursday was my last day of classes, and on Saturday I went to Toronto to spend a long weekend there, culminating in a seminar at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) on Monday. I spoke on modified gravity and had an interesting day discussing physics, and an entertaining dinner discussing other topics entirely, with Neal Dalal, Latham Boyle, Jonathan Sievers, Mike Nolta, Lev Kofman, Dick Bond, and others (told you I’d give you a shout-out Neal).
I was supposed to leave this evening to spend tonight in New York and get up refreshed to give a talk at the 8th Northeast String Cosmology Meeting, organized by the Institute for Strings, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University, and held at the The New York Academy of Sciences in their new home at 7 World Trade Center. However, since my flight was horribly delayed I’m getting a very early one tomorrow instead – cross your fingers for me please! Also speaking at this event are Nathan Seiberg, Justin Khoury and Raphael Bousso, so I definitely don’t want to miss any of their talks, never mind making it in time for my own.
Maybe I’ll see some New York CV readers there, since the event is free to non-members as part of some special promotion, as long as you sign up (full information here).
Anyway, I’ll report on this event when I return – better try to get to sleep early so that I can get up at 4am!
December 14th, 2006 at 10:31 pm
[...] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/12/14/catching-up-lisa-randall-parents-toronto-and-new-york/ [...]
December 15th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
Lisa didn’t focus on that, and instead presented the idea mainly as a phenomenological construction. I thought this worked very well and allowed the audience to focus on the more immediate applications and testable aspects of the models without throwing up the many other questions that go along with string theory.
I think this is what needed to be done. Again I draw attention to JoAnnes article in Detectors 101
If you can show this line of thing accordingly to model apprehension, then it doesn’t seem so far fetch and is spoken with some credibility. Such journey’s into the theoretics does not then seem so “disjointed from reality” for lay people and those educated, as well.
Maybe you can expound more on the “phenomenological construction” as if you were “curator in a museum.”
December 16th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Warped Passages is the best string theory book I’ve read so far, from my point of view. Dr Randall is searching for interesting things, the connections between the theory and the reasons real world phenomena, like why gravity is especially weak. That kind of problem is more interesting to me than coming up with reasons for non-observed particles or non-observed Planck scale unification. Maybe it is because they are searching for explanations for known facts that they have very high citations. If so, that is very encouraging. If the physics community is really most influenced by people trying to connect theory to experimental facts (ie, not spin-2 gravitons, not supersymmetry, not 10^500 parallel universes), then it is very encouraging. The probability that any stringy ideas are the correct ideas is less than 1, seeing that there is no solid (falsifiable) prediction yet, but it is encouraging that researchers who are trying to make connections to real observations are generating the most interest and the most respect in the physics community.
December 16th, 2006 at 11:19 am
RE: the trackback in comment 1, which links to a claim that cosmology is not science. I’ve seen similar disputes, eg, a Daily Telegraph article by Roger Highfield reports:
Prof Heinz Wolff complained that cosmology is “religion, not science.” Jeremy Webb of New Scientist responded that it is not religion but magic. … “If I want to sell more copies of New Scientist, I put cosmology on the cover,” said Jeremy.
- http://www.science-writer.co.uk/news_and_pr/announcements/2005a_announcements.html
I disagree with the implied attack on the big bang, which does make checkable predictions which were observationally confirmed in detail, such as abundance of light elements and microwave background radiation (for which a Nobel Prize was rightly awarded).
The big bang is definitely a science so long as you don’t get too far into claiming that ad hoc modifications to general relativity (cosmological constant powered by “dark energy”) were predicted by Einstein’s steady state cosmology of 1917. If you religiously worship it, then you’re not doing science. The key thing is being critical about the more speculative ideas and “fixes” involved, without throwing the baby out with the bath water by not accepting well verified facts: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/tiredlit.htm is a very important page about the big bang evidence.
December 16th, 2006 at 11:28 am
(The cosmological constant powered by dark energy is superfluous if you allow for quantum gravity: force causing “exchange radiation” between distant receding masses is redshifted by recession, weakening gravity. That maps the supernova recession data on to general relativity without requiring any cosmological constant. There is simply a weakening of long range gravity from this mechanism. Hence dark energy isn’t required to negate long range gravitational attraction.)
December 16th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Cascading is important, even while thinking of the cosmos?
December 21st, 2006 at 2:19 pm
Sadly I read this too late to make an appearance – wish I had known about it much earlier. Which brings up a useful point: can you start an informal page of known talks/conferences, date/location, are you attending, open/closed and level of discourse? Or perhaps just the ones any of you are planning to attend or speak at? This might be a better way to give your readership (learned or not) a heads-up.
December 21st, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Hi beezle. I can’t start a new page of general meetings, but my own calendar is prety up to date usually:
http://www.physics.syr.edu/~trodden/calendar.html
December 22nd, 2006 at 4:42 pm
thanks!
January 2nd, 2007 at 11:04 pm
The 8th Northeast String Cosmology Meeting
As promised before my extended season-of-indulgence break, I thought I’d report on my day at the 8th Northeast String Cosmology Meeting, organized by the Institute for Strings, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University, and held…
January 3rd, 2007 at 8:14 am
[...] As promised before my extended season-of-indulgence break, I thought I’d report on my day at the 8th Northeast String Cosmology Meeting, organized by the Institute for Strings, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University, and held at the The New York Academy of Sciences in their new home in the rebuilt 7 World Trade Center. [...]
April 21st, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Did science fiction help Lisa Randal with her various multiple dimensions of her warped universe book? Did her book, help any new science fiction writer write their next book or movie.
In Disney’s Latest Science fiction epic–”The Last Mumzie”
They send a hi-tech stuffed animal, through another dimension, to reach Earth in the 21st century.