Lisa Randall on Coast to Coast Sat. 2/25

[Math Is Hard]

I only listened to the first couple of segments of the interview (couldn't stay up for the whole thing), but I thought she was great! I felt like Art was having a hard time keeping up with her at first, and then he started trying to pull her into directions she clearly wasn't interested in going (to appeal to the tastes of his audience obviously), but she was not having it. She stayed very focused and sincere. I may go out and buy her book.

I am looking forward to hearing the rest of the show. Did she have to stick around and take questions from callers? That was the most annoying part of the last Brian Greene interview. Too many nutball questions from callers. I could tell he was getting irritated.

oh, did you notice Art called her a "female Michio Kaku"?

 

[franznietzsche]

As for "the suggestion that there might be life in alternate dimensions based on an entirely different rules of chemistry as compared to our universe," Sagan used to speculate about matters like life/civilizations on other planets. However, considering other or alternate dimensions seems to be in the realm of science fiction.

String Theory actually. What she was saying made sense and was not ridiculously speculative. The way its been summarized is the way Art kept saying it, which was not how she said it.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I'm just thinking "Harvard on Art Bell? Is that making Bell look good or Harvard look bad?"

Here I'm thinking: "She's playing to his audience."

She wouldn't say that it might be possible if as an expert far beyond anyone here, she didn't think it could be true.

Edit:Again, she made it clear that his is just speculation. I'm not sure if Bell pulled this out of her or if perhaps she even discusses it in her book. But this is why Bell is good. He gets people to say what they really think.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I only listened to the first couple of segments of the interview (couldn't stay up for the whole thing), but I thought she was great! I felt like Art was having a hard time keeping up with her at first, and then he started trying to pull her into directions she clearly wasn't interested in going (to appeal to the tastes of his audience obviously), but she was not having it. She stayed very focused and sincere. I may go out and buy her book.

Yes, she was good. She even handled the Phily Experiment question very well. They did allow a few questions from callers, which were, as usual, mostly a waste of time. But when the callers asked nonsense questions, she just side stepped the question and gave an interesting answer for something else. :rofl:

oh, did you notice Art called her a "female Michio Kaku"?

Yes; did you notice that he never said this when she was on the air?

I couldn't believe that she never spoke to the notion of the big bang resulting from the "collapse" of a hyperdimensional surface. She did briefly mention the possibility of a collision of branes, but only for a moment. I even fast blasted, but without Romona, who is tending the fast blast?

Oh yes. Did anyone notice that she seemed pleased and surprised at some of Bell's questions. I think he really surprised her with some of his more lucid and informed comments and questions.

 

[Astronuc]

String Theory actually. What she was saying made sense and was not ridiculously speculative. The way its been summarized is the way Art kept saying it, which was not how she said it.

I didn't listen to the show. I was going on comments quoted on Art Bell's site - http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2006/02/25.html#recap

Extra Dimensions & Global Warming
Professor of Theoretical Physics at Harvard University and author of Warped Passages, Lisa Randall talked about various topics in Physics, including the fascinating idea that there may be extra dimensions.

Note - I did not say ridiculously speculative. However, I did say speculative and referred to the realm of science fiction!

As for referring to Randall as a "female Michio Kaku", sounds like marketing sensationalism, which always makes me cringe.

I am a 'nuts and bolts' engineer with a physics background. I don't care for speculation. I focus on hard reality of nature and the challenges that offers in areas of applied physics and engineering, primarily in nuclear and aerospace technology.

 

[franznietzsche]

I didn't listen to the show. I was going on comments quoted on Art Bell's site - http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2006/02/25.html#recap


Note - I did not say ridiculously speculative. However, I did say speculative and referred to the realm of science fiction!

As for referring to Randall as a "female Michio Kaku", sounds like marketing sensationalism, which always makes me cringe.

I am a 'nuts and bolts' engineer with a physics background. I don't care for speculation. I focus on hard reality of nature and the challenges that offers in areas of applied physics and engineering, primarily in nuclear and aerospace technology.

The whole point of string theory is the idea that there are extra dimensions. So it sounds like you would call string theory science fiction.

I don't see any quotations from her posted there, so I don't know what you're talking about. What she was talking about was the idea of there being extra spatial dimensions, and potentially in order for us to see something with light it may be that it has to be at the same point in the other dimensions as us, but that this rule may not apply to gravity--so dar k matter could be matter displaced away from us in one (or more) of the extra dimensions. Thats what she was talking about.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Note - I did not say ridiculously speculative. However, I did say speculative and referred to the realm of science fiction!

I think this speaks to a higher standard than science fiction. Science fiction does not necessarily need to be plausible, even in a speculative sense, based on our current understanding and theories of science. And of course without speculation, say in the case of speculation about alien life in our 3+1 space, we wouldn't pursue projects like SETI. The greatest ideas begin with "what if".

It is often cited that as a young man, Einstein wondered what the universe would look like if he could ride on a photon.

 

[Ratzinger]

Does someone know the level and style of the book? Is it more than your average pop science book with the usual intro to relativity and quantum theory plus her theory?

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

Does someone know the level and style of the book? Is it more than your average pop science book with the usual intro to relativity and quantum theory plus her theory?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060531088/?tag=pfamazon01-20

According to the reviews, yes.

---edit---
Sorry I read that as "more of" rather than "more than" by accident.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Yes, the book is a lot more than the usual stuff, if not quite to the level of The Elegant Universe. She gives you the by now familiar intro to the standard model, including some of its less popularly known features. Then she carefully introduces you to her model, which involves extra dimensions which are "warped" in the sense of having not a Euclidean, but an anti-deSitter geometry. The AdS geometry isn't put in by hand; she deduces it from the dynamics of the gravitational behavior: escaping from our four dimensional spacetime into the five dimensional bulk that our universe is just a boundary of. It turns out the gravity is very strong near our spacetime and falls off exponentially as you move away from the boundary in the fifth direction. And when she plugs this fact into Einstein's equations she gets AdS.

I really enjoyed the book, and I enjoyed her talk, which was kind of "Chapter Titles from the Book" with slides.