In terms of what it does today, I mean it’s a bit of a circular reason but given the speed of stars and the potential for keeping stars in our solar system of course one could rightfully argue that without dark matter stars would not be going at the speed that they are going at. With regards to calling these things ‘enigmatic’ or ‘mysterious’, I think you’re right, we are just alienating people from the actual science. LR: In physics, general relativity and quantum mechanics were new ways of thinking about things. I mean, I think everyone here in Japan handled things really well and they were great. That doesn’t mean we know everything. And for me, for many reasons. Robert Birnbaum is editor-at-large at Identity Theory. So there are lots of choices that the theory itself presents or we are making because we don’t know what the connections are. Is that true? My students actually re-did the analysis, being more careful, taking into account the gas in the galaxy, and actually found a result even better than the one we found. I don’t know the answer. ":"&")+"url="+encodeURIComponent(b)),f.setRequestHeader("Content-Type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded"),f.send(a))}}},s=function(){var b={},d=document.getElementsByTagName("IMG");if(0==d.length)return{};var a=d[0];if(! I was having fun, what can I say? And it’s true that sometimes the science itself is abstract, but they are also interested in real-world issues and they are connected—so it’s people that are connected even though the research, in some ways, is very ethereal. But some things that are described as the most creative didn’t seem like that at the time. RB: And then of course the work is to convert that to something repeatable and understandable, in a public language. LR: That’s a really fun example and it’s different—a really immediate thing. LR: That’s right. We absolutely don’t conclusively know that and I never pretend that we do. Definitely people would like science to inform their work more. It doesn’t prove anything but it is encouraging. Where are they?” So there are basic assumptions going into what it actually predicts. I think we were trying very hard when we had done the project before that which was to do with something called supersymmetry. Ideas free to stream and download. One thing that keeps you youthful is constantly going out and learning new things and doing new things. RB: And it’s not operational until 2007. There are also just practical things. It doesn’t mean that it does everything, but the other thing about a book is that you can put in the background information. I would go that far. What kind of verifiability is there in the models you create? There is nothing we respect more than your privacy. More by Robert Birnbaum. I don’t know the numbers but there are thousands. That’s one of the things I want to get clear. Professor of Science on the physics faculty of Harvard University. RB: It was a nice touch to have epigrams from popular songs. [A brane is a membrane-like object in higher dimensional space that can carry energy and confine particles and forces.—ed.] Her research includes elementary particles, fundamental forces and dimensions of space. That would be very exciting. That was really against the religious grain—the idea that there is randomness increasing in the universe, in some sense. How did it happen that he read this book? RB: When you talk about extra dimensions, why not posit there are an infinite number? And this happened several times. LR: Really weak at a fundamental level. But it involves things we don’t understand yet. A lot of the so-called imaginative things come from me knocking my head against the wall while trying to work through what the potential solutions are to various problems. It’s her research on dark matter that most intrigues her. On the other hand it is not necessarily true that everyone is this weirdo image that you get for scientists. The warped extra dimension came about because we recognised what the theory had given us, we were paying attention, we understood what the problems were and that this could be a solution to various things, and just by working it out. RB: Has physics education kept up with the changes in the science? LR: That’s absolutely right. One of the nice things about math and science is it’s obvious, you get the answer or you don’t get the answer. It’s sort of a mystery thing. RB: I thought part of the reason that you wrote this book was for the layman, which I would think made a writer’s input valuable. LR: You can, but where do you get science out of it? LR: Yeah, I grew up in a pretty typical semi-suburban neighborhood in Queens. Lisa Randall has done what few physicists have done - make physics sexy, or at least close to it. The question is, why is it science? Asked if she would rather be a woman in science than talk about women in science, Dr. Randall said, "I'd rather be a scientist." LR: We don’t know if it is right. LR: Right. It’s not something I am going to rule out, but we’ll see if I can actually do it. Don’t forget, a lot of this was found in say the last 100 years so it’s quite amazing how much progress we’ve made. I read all sorts of things. Randall It is excellent. Again, that’s something I thought a lot about, trying to appeal to many different people by including the details but also the broader-brush picture. What are the connections and what are the questions we are trying to answer? So from Newton to then—no great discontinuities? This flies in the face of all conventional wisdom in theoretical particle physics. One of the really interesting things was to see—I have friend who studied English but just how her logical mind could absorb these ideas and the questions she would ask when she read it were good questions, showing that she was really was getting it. In fact, I just ordered one. //]]> For me it is much more valuable and fun to contribute something I feel like other people wouldn’t necessarily do. But a lot of times we just won’t know until we make the observation – we really want to see something that tells us the nature of dark matter for example, and we can guess many possibilities but we really want to see something that will match the data to that. Obviously that’s always the dream. '. LR: I don’t think we had cheerleaders, but there were sports teams—I was definitely more into math and science than other kids, and studying. But now I have. Spoiler alert! LR: It was fantastic. Lisa Randall (Photograph: Phil Knott) And yet, it’s perhaps not coincidental that the sole female contributor is none other than Harvard’s Lisa Randall , one of the most influential theoretical physicists of our time, and her essay is the most intensely interesting in … I mean there are many different competing proposals and I think it’s just important to outline any possibility that can be trusted. That’s how we found the extra dimensions—we had strong clues that it worked, and we found evidence that it would look like our gravity. Cormac was nice—he’s read a lot of this stuff, and he’s such a good writer, and it was really encouraging. Harvard theoretical physicist Lisa Randall is even more skeptical. That’s the thing about writing a popular book: You realize the things you understand because for those you can give a really simple explanation. Also, they come with different backgrounds, they know different things, so I wanted to have enough new stuff as well as background, and even for people who did know this, to know how I am thinking about the background. Robert Birnbaum: Looking through the book’s acknowledgements, you thank Cormac McCarthy. Maybe soon, but right now I would like to be doing the things I like to do. I worked on A Projective Opera that premiered at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and went on to several other places, and it was the composer Hector Parra who contacted me about that. It is recording definite signals, what was there, what charges it had, what energy it had? Randall readily acknowledges this in our conversation below. RB: What is the end game or goal? The idea of entropy—having entropy and that it increases. While the subject matter of her recent book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (included in the New York Times’ list of 100 notable books of 2005) may not be the stuff of water-cooler conversations, part of its mission is to make the new concepts of physics warm and fuzzy to a wider audience. Strings, branes, and baryogenesis—our man in Boston is guided through contemporary science by one of the country’s top theoretical physicists, Lisa Randall. When you us say weak, you mean measurably weaker? Albert Einstein’s immense legacy to understanding the universe includes, for physicists, an image of the wild-haired, distracted scientist scratching indecipherable hieroglyphics on a blackboard. LR: Yeah, I have been asked a million times.