Seattlest Pix 09Nov21
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For the penultimate Town Hall Science Lecture, Harvard theoretical physicist hottie Lisa Randall came to town to explain where the universe's extra dimensions are hiding. We gather from the capacity crowd upstairs at Town Hall that this is something people are concerned about. Maybe they are hiding terrorists.
You may not be aware that there are extra dimensions, but there are. And according to the math, they're around here somewhere. For her talk, Randall drew on her book, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions. She's got local cred, too, thanks to her collaboration with UW Physics' prof Andreas Karch.
Another UW professor (Adelberger? we didn't catch the name) introduced her and for a physicist was surprisingly unaware that a podium's microphone will produce substandard results at a distance of two -- sometimes retreating to four -- feet. We still gleaned these facts: that Randall has won many prizes at the state fair and enjoys rock climbing in her free time.
We don't know if anyone's studied this, but there's a correlation between the braininess of a talk and the number of people whose intersection with consensual reality is a null set. (Ha ha! Okay, we'll stop.) We don't know what Town Hall's policy is on recording, but the moron in front of us was trying to stealthily record the talk. He positioned two books on top of the edge of the pew he was in, then draped his jacket (recorder peeping out of a pocket), on top of that. Two minutes later, during the introduction, he knocked it all onto the floor.
Then he carefully restacked all of it, having learned absolutely nothing from the experience. We wanted to smack him, but as we say, we weren't sure what the policy was (on recording, not smacking).
A recap of the lecture follows the jump. We'll leave the rest of you with Randall's anecdote about running across a reference to her field of study in Elle magazine of all places. It was prior to Bush's election, and the Elle writers were picturing a reporter stumping him with a question about his position on brane theory. They imagined Bush would redden and say, "The people know what's in my heart." The Town Hall audience chuckled appreciatively, and Randall said, half to herself it felt, "I really like giving talks in Seattle." Applause.
Randall accompanied her lecture with a PowerPoint presentation, and since we're so quotable on the subject, we'll point out that it was a rookie presentation. It combined talking points she read right off the slide, charts and graphs that needed substantial explanation to be understood, and low-quality visuals. As a case in point: "If you're wondering why that peanut is up there," Randall said about one slide with a galaxy on it and a peanut inset, "it's because this number is bigger than the number of peanuts you could put end-to-end across a galaxy."
Her introduction to the topic struck us as interminable, and not because we know all that much about it. (From our notes: "slow intro...*yawn*...MEGO!") It was just that the set-up was lame. Needed more salt. We're going to rearrange things a bit the way we like.
The first thing about extra dimensions is that they're only extra to us. Dimensions are just coordinates, attributes of location that help us find something. There's no need for there to be only three or four -- and in fact string theory calls for between 9 and 11. We just happen to be used to seeing things in 3-D. (We might intellectually know that time is the fourth dimension, but it's harder to visualize and work with intuitively.)
That said, extra dimensions aren't a topic just because it's nice to think there are more out there. They're a response to scale incompatibilities in the Standard Model. The idea that there might be more out there has been around for a while, since 1919 when Theodor Kaluza proposed there could be extra dimensions, and 1926 when Oskar Klein (who was clearly high at the time) suggested these dimensions couldn't be seen because they were curled up so small.
Brane theory submits that there are membranes that trap particles and forces (the strings in string theory) -- except for gravity, which gets a hall pass. Because if you can have one brane, you can have more than one, one hypothesis is that the brane we're on is located near a gravity brane -- gravity is weak because it's strongly localized. Not being on the gravity brane, we only see its fainter effects. (This has the benefit of not needing to reinvent gravity -- it's still a strong force, just not here).
Multiple branes would essentially be multiple universes, each with their own particular particle-force interactions, depending on ratios, kinds, and quantities. So it's possible we live in a multiverse of branes (which is not the same thing as quantum theory's Many Worlds multiverse). Some we might be able to interact with at some level, but others would likely exist outside the horizon of provided by the speed of light and the age of our universe. You simply can't get there from here.
Another hypothesis is that branes can have apparent pockets of higher or lower dimensions. Thanks to the warping effects of gravity on spacetime, higher dimensions get hidden from us (this is an alternative to the "rolled up so tiny you can't see 'em" theory). The Large Hadron Collider will help us test these hypotheses by allowing us to experiment at the energy levels where the inconsistencies appear. If higher dimensions are hiding out there, we should be able to see evidence in the particles created.
This kind of experimentation is hugely expensive and some might ask what good it is, just to clear up some inconsistencies -- that's a difficult question to answer because we're talking about inhabiting a fundamentally different reality. What good is a new reality? Generally you don't know until you get there.
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Do I win anything for guessing correctly that this was an MvB piece based solely on the headline?
you win nothing but self-satisfaction, Matt. But thanks for saying so -- I thought I really nailed that one, too. I've been reading "Comedy Writing, Step by Step," and I think it's paying off.