the contributions that physics and scientific thinking have need to or understanding of the universe. this is a little over an hour. >> we will get started. coming in their seats to my left where you cantt stand off to the corners or fino an open seat towards the back. welcome to politics and prose and think you all for beingpr here. i am mike and i want to start just by welcoming you and saying thanks you insane inks for being here on behalf of

our new owners, bradley graham and lisa muscatine. in this staff here but they collected things were supporting the event series tonight in here for lisa randall and her second book, trained for. we are excited to have her here to talk about this book. if you're new here, welcome and i would quickly go over the format of what's going to happen. lisa is going to present her boat virtual talk about her book using visual as well. but we are going to do is leave the light of because we are recording. if you want to connect it to the corners, you have a pretty good view of it. will i be little time for q&a from u.s. courts. we look forward to your input because we recorded as i said, we are going to take questions from the audience think vote in the middle aisle. if you can get to that, that would be a of a multi-questions

remain. afterwards while the book signing. lisa will find both her books, trained for available in the front of the door. it's always a good idea to silence cell phones, too. and that's how wilco. so again, above all, just like to say thanks this is a nice turnout and a great crowd, so welcome to politics & prose than welcome to lisa randall. as i said, her new book is walking on heavens door, how science and the modern world. lisa is a professor of theoretical physics at harvard university and the team expert on critical physics, cosmology. she is one of the most highly cited and influential theoretical physicist. she has appeared in discoverer, the economist, "newsweek," scientific america, among many other publications. she has been a fun time at magazines 100 most influential

people. as i said, "knocking on heaven's door" is her second book. her first book, warped passages is about the universe is hidden dimensions. "knocking on heaven's door" is that scientific research today, specifically at the large collator and the author's own investigative particles into strength. and cosmology into modern physics from the core knowledge, the smallest objects to the outer boundaries and outer threshold young understanding. this is her book to present and we are happy that she's here to do that. thanks to you for being here. please welcome to politics & prose, lisa randall. [applause] >> welcome. >> thank you very much. it's a pleasure to be here. so first of all, a watchmaker that i don't necessarily think this book is just a book.

it's a book about the nature of science. the hydro collator is an example of the kind of science they want to talk about, but what i'm trained to do is explain a little more what are the elements of thinking that go into science. that's not to say i don't spend time talking about the hydrocodone later and dark under searches for example. but there's a lot of more general element. it's funny because i haven't been to politics & prose before an economy going to give a political top class and i do speak, so i had that part covered. but really i do think even not send, i think it's really important for people quite generally to start thinking a little more scientifically and understand what it means in terms of what the rule is to take place in terms of what it means to be right and wrong come in terms of the rule creates unity plays in what we do come

in terms of a lot of things we don't often associate the science. we often think of it is something we something and you get the answer. there's a lot more going on and when science is happening, there's a lot more back-and-forth going on an understanding rule is really important are the aspects of what i'm going to talk about. not because it's only a short talk we don't have time to get the entire book, i actually have two different talks i've been giving her that i'm going to be kidding. when it's about to march high point writer and once about the concepts really important physics and that is the concept of scale. and so i'm going to begin to talk by talking about scaling and we'll see some of the exciting physics on the way. keep in mind what they want to get across is by thinking in terms of scale is important not just for physics, but all science and really more generally. so with that, i will actually begin the actual top.

again, thank you for having me here. so the title is "knocking on heaven's door." i think my friends pulled nine out of 10 low like the title. really what i want to get across in the title is what we're doing. i wanted to convey the fact that we have this very established base of knowledge, but were trying to go beyond in trying to prove this edges. so we're trying to get beyond the nuts of science is doing. so is trying to get a little beyond. so what i say how physics and scientific thing that it's really both physics is relevant for understanding nature of writing for, that scientific taking has a much better application and for deeper understanding. so i'm just going to begin with a quote from a song, suzanne vega. what's so small to you is so large to me.

less than regular on the pc. i guess the gourmet top. the part of what i'm talking about is why there are very small objects that are against it in the kind of physics a few. i'm a particle physicist primarily. when objects are relevant to understanding nature of growth but also by focusing on small issues can sometimes eliminate your things and how as to your i'm going to start with a nice photograph someone gave me. it's a photograph from paris as you might've guessed. and you can tell because it has a lot of iconic paris features that has the eiffel tower in the background. it has a kiosk advertising performance. and it has cars on this tree, which is very typical. so it's kind of your typical.

c. so what do i want to get across here? the thing i want to get across is what you see depends on how you look at, what resolution you have, what skill you choose to focus on. so if you think about the eiffel tower, you can look at it from very far away in which case if you just how they map you'd hardly notice it was there. i would not be a way to know about the eiffel tower. you would know its existence in the same way that many aspects of ethics we don't do without until we really zoom into that scale. and of course, i could look very close and then i went seen nothing that conveys sort of beauty intelligence and the greater the ironwork to be a lot to study the detailed structure. but if you want to study the eiffel tower there's an appropriate scale for that. i don't necessarily want to take into account all the little details. of course i could zoom in even closer into the iron and look at atoms and molecules, but that's not relevant.

and thinking on a particular scale. but what i really wanted you to see in that site, which is a much more is if you zoom in, you would see my name on it. [laughter] so when i'm going to spend the time it is getting to you to the point of understanding how my name ended up in paris. it's actually a bit delayed, but if you look great here, that's my name right there. last night okay. so welcome back to bed at the end of the talk. for now, let's just think about deal because i think it's an important concept. one of the reasons i want to focus on this is when i talked about were passages, a lot of people who are extremely interested are kind of the misconceptions sometimes about how to does relate to the kinds of things we see, the exotic

ideas of extra dimension. but how can there be a continuous transition from these very exotic ideas that apply a very tiny scale in our intuition is of course guided by what we see an human scales. we think about the types, a lot of people think it's almost magical or not though because it's not what they see in their daily lives. anyone who is seen and not the coalition knows that you can't always trust your eyes. in fact, we can trust are things you can measure and record and make measurements and it consistently get the same answer. it may not be with intuitive in the sense that it isn't what you see every day would be wiped on the street but that doesn't mean it's not there. it just means it's not obvious to us as human beings. that report to get across with the physicists in the world, whether or not we as human beings hit and our challenge is to get that information out, to be able to interpret things as technology advances to

understand what's going on. so what i'm saying in this light is our vision is relatively narrow. and of course if you go to scale that are smaller than a few hundred nanometers were talking about come if you go to scales holler, you will be able to literally see something. you're visible light is not going to have the sensitivity to see things. so that means when we see things that particle class, it's, it's not the way they traditionally do. it has to be something we considered more direct measurement. the history of measurement going from direct to indirect is really interesting, even at the time of galileo in the hunt for telescope and microscope. it's the first time people were using lenses as an intermediate device. even the precision measurements were not using intermediate devices. since then we've had more and more distance in some sense from what we see, but there's nonetheless a very rigid connection between that these

devices are measuring in what we see. in fact the physical universe evolves in enormous range of sales for critics in the milliliter to kilometer to rapper heads around. many different fields and many interesting things happening on them. before i go on, i want to take a brief tour so we can set the landscape. of course we can start to very large scale. in principle, scales can be at large. we have no idea how big it is that we consider the size of the known universe, the visible universe, the universe that we can see given the speed of light and given the length of time the universe has existed. and that's at the top about 10 to 27 meters. when you talk about the universe come you have to be careful as there's two ways things can be smaller. one is looking back into the earlier universe and you have them outside the universe went

when radiation is emitted when it was smaller, but of course we have objects in this kind of the subjects are various sites. the contact about galaxies, solar system, earth orbit, many different sizes and spending a huge range of scales. one thing interesting about all the scales is this really the same watch of physics apply never the sales. we're not trying to adjust the physics as we go to different scales. if we go to high density we may need to use general relativity. basically we use the laws of gravity, laws that were all familiar with. it's different in principle if you look at smaller scales because we think of going out there, but you can also go inside. of course a lot of that is much, much harder to actually visualize. it's much harder to visualize small scales and that's a challenge to me as a writer to convey what's going on on the small scales because it isn't as

intuitive as a unique ways to think about it. what's also interesting is you can see -- you fail you to scale, but then you get to scales for a time of physics or quantum physics might be a better description. so you've really changed the nature of the way you're going to describe things using classical physics to quantum physics. when they got to get across is what that means. does that mean one is right in what is wrong? was going on there? one skill i want to focus on here is the scale for large hytrin collator measurements. if you're wondering what that is, there's a big ring underneath the ground. we'll come back to that later, but that pictures are presented and then it kind of the frontier scale in terms of what we can actually look out his experiments. that is the frontier energy scale for experiments and 9010th to 19 centimeters and that is far smaller to anything we can imagine seeing. nonetheless were about to learn

about those distant scales from high-energy experiments performed there. in this chart, i also talk about some other scales. the series is smaller than the scales to large high jumped collator can scale. many smaller scales even think about. thos .. not explored in a time in the near future as far as we know. nonetheless there can interesting physics happening there. it's probably even a limit to this here we can talk about to the distant scales we can talk about and i'll come back to that later. there's this enormous range even below probing this incredibly small scale, 10 minus 19 meters. but that's not even near the end of scales and might have principle explored. some unquestionably want to keep in mind is, how can we talk about things with all these unknowns? how can we enjoy physics with all this stuff not yet known?

so there's things straight in there one is that that's a lot of information. we're covering 62 magnitudes of scale. how can we keep track of everything going on? that's a lot of information. furthermore we saw different physical description center. besought classical mechanics for some scales and quantum mechanics at other scales. if we kept going going down the scale we might each have something called quantum gravity which could provide gravity in a way that would wor so we really want a theoretical tool for organizing information, and that's what we, as physicists do. we have a tool of organizing information known as the effective theory. i want to get across to you what i mean. what do we mean? well, the solutions sound obvious in some sense. there's stuff out there, but let's keep track of what we need to keep track of. let's keep track of the

effective quantities relative to observations. that's to say, if i can't measure something, maybe i don't need to use that in the description, just absorb it, bundle it up into the quantities i can measure. that turns it into a trackable problem so you're not caught up with unnecessary details. so i think this is kind of a generally obvious concept you use all the time without realizing it. if you want to find politics and prose, and if you're far away, find washington, d.c.. you have a map where it's not showing up on the left. that's a different scale you're looking at there than when looking on the right hand side when you want to know what to do when on military road. you have to focus in. some cases you keep track of individual streets, but in other

cases you just keep track of the larger global structure. that's how we do it. if we needed to use a street map across the country, that's impractical. when we need to, we can zone in on the map on the right. i think i'm sure many of you come from many different backgrounds, and it's a general way of thinking. you identify the scale for the problem at hand. if you're doing literature, you might be doing close reading focusing on individual words or the big picture, the big story. biology, we are now seeing that some people will do molecular biology, but you have to integrate that into a larger picture. there's psychology, and in every kind of motive thought, you might focus in on individual elements or try to put it together in this big picture,

and it wouldn't hurt or think about what's going on in the world today. let's take a physics example. suppose i throw a ball, and i want to figure out where it lands. i'm not going to think of the ball in terms of its atomic structure, and i'm not going to worry about the corks and electrons inside. i'll think of it as a ball, and that work, and that worked find for newton, and that'sst -- that's how physics works. he didn't say he was clever, he just figured out what happens if you throw a ball, and the measurements made at the time would not distinguish it's a fact from an atomic structure. it's completely irrelevant. we don't use it when we calculate the trajectory of the ball. if there's a problem involving atoms, but not for calculating

the ball. it doesn't make a difference. in some sense, both theories are correct. you can see quantum mechanics is the theory, that's really what's going on. in fact, classical physics is a qualification for quantum physics, so it works, it's effective. if you don't measure anything that tells you the difference, then you're not going to need to use it, but, of course, the history of physics is making progress so what happens is you finally come to a point where it breaks down and you have to do something different, and that's how you advance. what happens when you do that is the old theory gets absorbed into the new theory. it's not necessarily wrong, but it won't apply to the entire regime of parameters you can think about. that's really how it works. in this, what's important is

stating when you make a measurement. what is the accuracy of which i made the measurement, and to what regime does it apply? it's the uncertainty that's leftover where there's room for something new, and if you don't have the measuring tools, not looking, you might not care, but at some point you will get there and find out something new that's going on. that's how physics progresses. i want you to think of physics today in that context. so this is what i just said, the distance, in this case, scale, distance scale, is essential as an organizing tool. we make calculations that way. you don't want to calculate the trajectory of the ball using quantum physics. you'd never get it. you'd never get the answer. as i said, the effective theory idea is the key to progress. that's what we have in the back of our mind. i mean, actually, everybody uses effective theories all the time,

but physicists give it a name, and we know we're using it. it's a really systematic thing. we can say what the uncertainty is, what it allows, there's a finite amount of numbers, predictions, and we can tell when it's going to break down. it's a very systematic way of doing what we all do intuitively. as i said, sometimes the smaller scale is known, in which case you might be able to derive it from fundamental physics, and other times it's not, and you can work in terms of those quantities themselves. you always want to keep the old ideas as long as they are correct. sometimes they are wrong, but if there's ideas that established over time that make successful predictions, they are right in a sense, and then you can advance when you find something new or something ceases to apply. in this case, say it's small or distance scale. we said atoms inside a ball,

but, of course, even within the on the, and this is an excuse to make sure everybody knows what's inside an atom, there's a smaller structure. we know it's not fundmental. it's made of nuclei with electrons around it, and the nuclei are not findmental either, and the protons and neutrons are not fundamental. there's io -- items called quarks, and that's what we have when we have a proton or a neutron. i just want to point out a quote when i wrote the first book. i realized i didn't read these books, so i glanced through a few of them to see what people do. i looked through one book that was written 2341947. -- in 1947. there's a great quote in it.

i'll let you think about it for a minute. it says, "instead of a rather large number of classical physics, there's protons, electron, and -- [inaudible] thus it seems we hit the bottom in the search of basic elements of which matter is formed." okay. i hope you see the irony in this quote. they thought, okay, we have the answer. we found the smallest scale, and it's very unlikely, i would say, that any of us are living at the time when we got all the answers and we end. as we've developed tools to looked in, we find there's this new strr, and that keeps happening. it would be rather incredible if we had found the bottom, and so i do find it ironic at a time being so excited of finding a new structure, he has the idea

there could be further structure that he just didn't have the tools yet to find. of course, there's also quarks inside as we discussed. they are interesting. they are theoretical motivations, but they were verified by experiment. that's another important thing that gets lost because physics are remote. we believe it when there's a connection between a theory and the experiment, and we have a unifying frame work to make many predictions that work. that's what this does. it tells you about quarks and the forces of which they interact, and there's ways it's tested at a very high level of precision. we are now looking to go beyond it. how do we go beyond it? we're at the frontier energy scale now. this is where we look at the large hedgeron collider.

large means large. it's a name given for objects that interacted via the strong force, and it's colliding together at high energies, and they are colliding. it's not a pretty name, but it is the name, and it's the large hadron collider, lhc. you have a huge underground tunnel, it's 27 kilometers in circumference, and there's a few rings, and the electrons are accelerated and they collide together at high energies in the collider, and in my book i joke i don't like to use it, but you have forced to use sue perlatives. it's the highest intensity machine. everything into it is the coldest extended place on earth. it has an amazing vacuum. everything about it is reaching extremes to get to as high energy and intensity as we can

do with the available technology on an industrial scale. i'll show you a little bit about what happens with a video. this comes in a linnier, goes around rings, then the lhc ring, dun a tunnel, and in tunnel you can walk around it. i've walked around it. you go into -- and here the protons enter the collision region. around that region, there's experiments, and when they collide, they go outward through the experiment and the various layers as you go out trance versely measure various aspects. not only is the hlc an amazing machine, but within it, there's amazing detecters. the ones i'm most interested is atlas and cms. they are general purpose detectors with the idea of if there's something new, they find it. they can measure as much as

possible with the particles relates charge, energy, a strong force, and that's what they do. we are very excited about what's going on there. this is the frontier energy scale. we know the standard model, we answer questions that go beyond the standard model. what are those questions? what do you think we might learn there? well, one of the things we'll learn is how to particles acquire mass? fundamental elementary particles acquire mass? we think of things just having mass, but turns out in the theoretical description of the particles, if you didn't have the extra mechanism called the higgs mechanism, you would make nonsensical predictions at high energies. it wouldn't make sense. it's not just a simple theory with fundamental masses.

there has to be something more interesting going on, and that's the higgs mechanism. i explain that in the book in terms of particle exploring mass. there's another puzzle in which, okay, particles get mass, but what sets the scale for the masses. in fact, it's a real puzzle if you just use quantum field theory which is what we use that combines together special relatively and quantum mechanics to do physics and we believe it's right. if you were to calculate how heavy you think the masses should be, you would find that there's a discrepancy of 16 in magnitude. to make the theory work, it looks like you have to do an enormous amount of fudge, or what we call "fine tuning." [laughter] i'm glad you laughed at it. we laugh too.

there has to be a more interesting structure there, and that's what i talk about in "war passages." it could be something as exotic as an extra dimension of space. we could be finding evidence of that. if it does answer this question of why masses are what they are, it should have testable consequences at the collider. these are the two things it does. one is understand the higgs mechanism. what is it? it's been in the news a little bit lately, and also what is it that gives part particles their mass? it's likely to be something rather interesting and the consistent theories we thought of have interesting aspects that can tell us more about the nature of space time. the other thing it might do at the large hadron collider is learn about the nature of dark matter. that's not necessarily true, but it does turn out -- what is dark

matter? it's matter, it's stuff like we have -- it aggregates and clumps, but it doesn't interact with light. it interagents gravitationally, but not with light. it's hard to see. it's dark matter, but it's really transparent matter because we see dark things, they absorb light. dark matter doesn't interact with light at all. that's the distinguishing feature of dark matter. nonetheless, it may have interaction with stuff we see, n., there's a compelling reason to think if it has a mass that we're talking about that the lhc is acquiring, we might have the right amount of dark matter, and there's experiments out there now looking for dark matter that has the mass that's being explored at the large hadron collider. it has the potential to tell us quite a bit about the nature of what's out there. also, it's not just looking for

particles, but looking for forces and descriptions -- it could be something much more interesting. what are the fundamental interactions that govern our universe? you have heard other questions. these are questions that won't necessarily be explored in experiments. in fact, we don't know how to explore them in most cases, but people nonetheless are studying it through theory, and one of the questions is what would be a consistent theory to combine together quantum mechanics and gravity? now, it's a theoretical puzzle for the following reason. any of the experiments we do, we can do without answering this question. again, back to the effective scale theory idea. string theory is not having impact on any experiments we're doing because it's a fundamental underlying structure we're not yet measuring so that means we can use quantum mechanics, use relativity to predict things

whether it's large or small scales. it's only when we get to the very, very tiny distance scales, 33 centimeters which is far beyond the tens of minus 17 centimeters. there's high energies when you need to know the answers if you do an experiment. nonetheless the fact we can't make predictions there. it tells us there is a theory that underlies what we see. there's a puzzle and question to be answered, but it's not a question that will necessarily have effects at the experiments we're doing which is, in fact, and in fact, it's the visibility that makes it hard to see, and the fact it can make a difference if it's fundamental strings or particles. it's hard to measure, but we can do experiments and interpret them in terms of our effective theory which you all understand now. i'm just going to mention for the fun of it that it even seems

like there could be a final short distance frontier because we explored all the distances. it looks like there is -- at this point, there is a distance scale known as the plank scale, this 10 minus three centimeters. you hear it with quantum gravity, but it's also, we don't know in principle how to go. even if it was a measurement at the scale smaller than the plank scale, how would i do it? ordinarily when we think about going to small distance scales, we think about high energies. why do we do that? because if you think of a high energy wave, it oscillates a lot; right? there's a shot wavelength with because there's many oscillations. if it's a short wavelength, you can probe small structure. you need variation on a scale in order to probe the structure. if you had low energies in a big

wavelength you can probe it. at the plank scale that breaks down, and it breaks down for reasons. if you go to a high energy, you put so much energy in a small scale that you would have a black hole. if you have more energy, it gets bigger and bigger. in a thought extreermt, we don't know how to study the short distances. it's an interesting thing that it seems there's a limit where there -- or there could be a limit where we actually talk about space in conventional terms. i should tell you that little nugget. this is coming back to what we do today. we know how the standard model works, but we expect there's more that lies beyond. there's questions we don't have answers to necessarily. why are masses what they are?

we hope that by studying at higher energies, a new regime we have not yet explored, a greater provision, greater uncertainty, we can see tell signs that lay beyond the standard model. we use effective theory, the scale that the large hadron collider is exploring. there's a unit of energy that particles use. maybe we'll find this more fundamental description. maybe we'll find substructure we have not yet explored. the challenge is to measure precisely enough that we see the effective theory fail. that's when we see the theory when we understand what its true limits are and reveals a more fundamental description or evidence for that. i'm going to just say one theory that i've worked on, but in order to do that, i just want to tell you more about scale. i'm not going to go into detail,

but i have a picture of an exciting thing we hope to learn at the large hadron collider, and then i'll go back and tell you why i ended up here. okay. so the fifth question since we're talking about scale, the set scale, it's an absolute distant scale, and in the theory of general relativity tells us how it works. before einstein's theory, we talked about energy defenses, but the absolute value of energy is important because it tells you about space time and about the metric. a metric is meaning to scales. basically, you have a ruler; right? if i say something is two apart, that wouldn't mean anything. do i mean two miles? two kilometers? do i mean two centimeters? what do i mean. i have a ruler establishes units, i can tell you. metrics tells you what the number means in terms of an

actual distance, but there's something else going on with the metric. the metric tells you about the curvature of space with angles between things. is it like a sphere? a saddle on a horse? is it just flat like the table top? that is also very important information. now, of course; it's very hard to picture the curvature of three dimensional space, so i don't recommend you do that necessarily, but we can think about what it means by going down one dimension and we can embed them in three dimensional space. you can see positively, negatively, and flat service on the pictures. we have three dimensional space, curvature, and that's important because it tells us about the nature of gravity. we can think of particles going through a curved space and following the most efficient path within the curved space, and that's mic mics the effects -- mimics the effects of gravity.

if i had things tunneling in here, it would be naturally attracted to the center. we understand the attraction of a planet for us in terms of warping the space time around the planet, for example. this curvature, basically energy warps the space or gives curvature to the pace, and that tells you how gravity will affect something moving through that space time. that's what this is showing. if you had a ball, for example, it's going to give that -- of course, again, it's a two dimensional reality, but it gives a flavor of what's going on. if something comes through, it's going to be attracted towards the center. how attracted it is depends on how heavy it is. if it's a high mass neutron star, it's curved more. if it's a black hole, it could be even more. the thing i'll tell you about very briefly and probably will be a little bit confusing

because i had to write an entire book to explain it, but i want to give you a flavor wha. we considered was the idea that there could be not just the three dimensions we know about, but actually an additional dimension of space we p don't see. why we don't see it could be many different reasons, but one, probably the most up tiewtive -- intuitive is it's just really tiny, but in this case, space is so warped that we don't see the the other dimension. it could have effects on our universe, and it could say something about gravity. space time itself could be warped or curved in such a way how you measure things dmendz on where you are. that's why i want to talk about what scale is. things could be heavy and gravity would have a big influence on if i'm on the gravity brain here, but if i move through the extra dimension, it could be that the scale changes. that's what the metric can tell

me. that's what we found. we just solved the equations of regime relativity in this context of having an extra dimension beyond what we see and three dimensional worlds at the end of it. brain stands for membrane. it's a lower dimensional surface and higher dimensional space. it could be that we live just on the weak brain. it looks three dimensional to us, but gravity could extend trout -- throughout the other dimension, and that could explain why masses what they are. we could be living in the portion of extra dimensional space and masses are what they are and not the bigger value we calculate when we use quantum field theory. it should be confusing, so don't feel badly if it is. it's an exciting possibility that's allowed when we consider the gravity of extra dimensions. the thing i want to emphasize here is as exotic and crazy as

this sounds, because it is answering this question about mass, that the large hadron collider is exploring, we have a chance of knowing whether this is right by doing measurements at the large hadron collider, even something as exotic as this warped dimensional theory. this is just to say why do we bother considering extra dimensions in the first place? you might ask that. one reason is just the spirit of inquiry. if there's a baby in a crib, they explore two dimensions, but my older sister tried to climb out of the crib. they try to explore the third and other dimensions. that's obvious it's there, but there could be others we don't see. we'll only know about them if we explore them. we don't know for sure they don't exist. we can only find out if they do by entertaining the idea they exist and what happens if they

did. einstein theory of gravity works for all dimensions, not just three. we know how to do the calculations, and it doesn't tell us the answer to how many dimensions there are. another reason is string theory. i said that combines together quantum mechanics and gravity, but it's only consistent if there's other dimensions of space. if you're a string theorist, you are forced to consider the possibility that there's extra dimensions. the other reason is the one i just gave you. it has the possibility of explaning connections among physical parameters in our universe, and that makes it worth exploring. maybe it's so hard to find the answer. people have been looking for an answer to this question about mass, smart fizzists have been looking for this answer for a few decades now, and we don't know what it is still. there's no theory that's so simp and beautiful. it's worth considering a slightly more exotic possibility, and then telling the experimenters how to look for it. that's what we play.

if this was the answer, this is what you should find. these experiments at the large hadron collider are tough. it's good to have big targets and what it is they want to look for. this is, again, the idea that gravity could be strong on the gravity brain and weak on the weak brain where we live, and you know that because my cousin is there. this is where we live. gravity could be much weaker than it is on the graff they brain. here's the signal. there could be particles that travel in the extra dimension. now, we don't see an extra dimension, so what we could see? particles that have properties of what we know about, but they seem to have a bigger mass. we would interpret the momentum as an extra dmangs of mass. we don't see the dimension. what the experiments look for are particles that a property like the ones we know about, but they are # heavy --

heavier. how heavy should they be? again, this is just the right mass for the large hadron collider to explore because it's answering questions about particle masses that we know about. if it's answering the question, collider should find the kk part -- particles. these are # a lot of ideas, a lot of stuff. i think for me it was important to say how these more conceptional ideas about scale, about right and wrong combined together with what we do all the time when we do science. i think it's really important. maybe we'll show it to be real, and it's the creative endeavors, but i wanted to end the talk by talking of other applications of these ideas in our projects because it's a lot of fun, and i actually think it's a good time to be thinking about the intersection of art and science,

and i don't think it's all great. some of it is terrible, but some is really interesting. this absorbs the culture of the time. it's interesting scientific ideas, and it's interesting to do them. i'll briefly mention a gallery show that we have in harlem, and i'll come back to what i mentioned in the beginning. okay. so the show we did was called measure to measure. this was the idea we had. a lot of us, art and science intersect. you take art and make a science thing look artistic or take a science idea or artistic ideas and say is there science in it. that's hard. what if you took a theme we both think about, and scale is one of them. it's the central to the way artists think and how scientists think. what we worked with the los angeles art association, put out a call for proposals and asked them to incorporate ideas that

we think are interesting, but what a scientists thinks about. as a scientist, an idea we saw earlier that if you look at small scales, things look different than in large scales. i don't see atoms, i see a table, but if i probed inside, it would be different. there's samples of what people came up with. whether looking at the tree itself, but if you look at the bark on the right, of course, it's not giving you the feel of that large tree. it's like the eiffle tower. this is fantastic. she had somebody do a scale of alice in wonderland, and she's carving the picture so they are one big thing. you have an intreg grated union of all the little pictures. again, individual pictures, but it turns into something

different when it's all put together. i'll just show one more. it looks like just pop art thing, but if you so many in close, which i can't, it's pictures of her face. it looks like someone's staring at you if you look close. it's various features. you see something different at the tiny scale. there's a number of other pieces of art too that were fantastic. the other thing i wanted to tell you about is what we call the projective opera that we had. hang on a second. so when i brought my first book, "war passages" it was about the extra dimension of space i briefly outlined. he read it, a composer of air com, and he wanted to intersect art and science and use science as an incentive.

he liked the idea of working with physical theory. i just finished writing the book and worked hard to organize the ideas, and it was such a liberating thought to say you could have many different voices, music, art, words, and just try to give an idea. of course, you're not teaching a lesson, but to give an idea of what the physics is about, but also as importantly to me was also why are we doing this? why explore? why do we think there's more out there? we wrote this small opera which is why we had that there, which is about this question of the difference between someone who thinks they have all the answers who lives in a three dimensional world, and someone who thinks there's more, who is a composer, couldn't finish the music, and went out into the high digital world. i'll play some of this because it's fun. ♪

it was a stage reading, they moved around a little bit, and she's exploring the extra dimension, and he's in the lower dimensional world. her voice is different than hers. that's what they want the to explore, go and explore, and so he's in this sort of -- matthew richie did the set. the baritone is in the lower dimensional world, and she explores, and he doesn't understand why she does that. why can't you just find the answers here? it's about what experiments do, someone who can go out and explore someone, and someone who stays home and sees things up directly. how can they believe it when they can't go and explore? one world was black and white, it looks colored here, and there was a technique because not an

orchestra pit for an opera, so we had screens that the orchestra was behind it. you can see her world is greener, might be hard to see in the bright room, but his world is more black and white. i'm not going to go through the whole thing here. as i said, it was pretty fun and interesting and seeing the people sing about physics. it really was kind of beautiful to watch, to put together a story. she's exploring this extra dimension he can't get to, and she's fascinated by it. he's just home. they actually got an equation. i was uncomfortable, so i told the composer, if you want to pick out equations, i'll fit it

in there. he picked which ones he wanted. what was interesting about that is a lot of time when you see art or music about scientists, they really actually -- rarely show them doing science. it was fun having it in an abstract way a little bit of an idea of what science is going on. ♪ i'll conclude, let it play out by saying i think it's pretty clear, and this is really what i want to get across. why do we think there's more there? every time we look, we find there is more there, and so it's very unlikely there's not. we have questions that we know there should be answers to, so it's really a very exciting time now because the large hadron collider is working and exploring energies. dark matter experiments are probing the things we think are

there, and we're trying to fit it all together, and that's what makes it exciting. i like this picture i saw on the tape this one time i was there, and it conveys an image of a 4r0uer dimensional world and this rich three dimensional world that could be out there, this thick world, a rich world that was there. i didn't know it at the time, but the picture is the chateau near the large hard collider, so it seemed appropriate. i'll let this play out, and maybe even stop it and say thank you. [applause] >> thank you, lisa. we have a few minutes, so we'll take questions, but we have 10 minutes to take three or four questions. >> thanks, lisa. in a recent article, lisa

grossman talks about the small unexplored range, the lac between 115 and 145. you got electron votes -- >> talking about the higgs? >> right. if that turns out not to be there, does that affect your thoughts with the theory of an extra dimension or two? >> i try to separate out the issues. there's two issues. one is what is it against particle's mass? one thing that's interesting -- let's focus on higgs first. what does it mean? right now people are worried because we're closing in on the mass range. actually, what's that the large hadron collider is designed to do. the higgs has one mass if it's out there, and it's supposed to find out what it is. if you asked people before they turned oned collider what they

thought the mass would be, most would have thought it's a value that has not yet been tested. i think water any additional data, they would have said, so, if you really believed that was rights, you would not be disturbed now? these are not the masses i thought it should be at, and they have not explored it yet. why is it disturbing? well, because until we have experiments, nobody knows the answer. you can say, i think the mass might be 116, but, you know, i could be wrong, and so maybe, you know, you'll feel a little safer if there's buffer room, and there could be more values. the fact is a lot of the values are now possible, so it is zoning in on the region we think is interesting, and over the course of the next year, we might know the answer the way the higgss, the simplest higgss is there. why are we doing this search? well, we don't actually know, even if the higgs mechanism is right. we don't know what it is that implements that higgs

mechanism. it could be the simplest model that gives predictions that we can know well because the higgs interacts with mass. it interagents with heavier particles more because they have more mass, but it could be more subtle that's underlying the higgs mechanism. if that's the case, it's not clear that these experiments would have been testing it. it could be that it's something different or it's heavier, that it has stronger interactions. it could be different. i view it we're learning about the nature of what the higgs could be. after all, right now, we can say -- i can pretend that we don't find the higgs mechanism, what it is that gives particles mass. all of us can ask that, and no one has an answer to it. everybody thinks the higgs mechanism is right, but the question is what is it precisely that is implementing it? >> i can ask another one.

in the future at some point, i guess the lhc will probably run out of things to look for, but what would be the argument for building a larger accelerator such as -- >> okay. so right now, i, myself, would feel we would be answer to all the questions about the higgs,s extra dimensions, if we had three times the energy. it's a rough argument. we know the energies and where things should appear, but we don't know precisely the energy where things should appear. for us as theorists, it's the same theory, but from an experimenter's point of view, you have a regime where there's no hope at all. the large hadron collider does a lot of exploration, but it's not clear it will actually explore everything because you need a lot of energy. what we have seen so far, so the large hadron collider, we started making that over 25

years ago. since then, we've learned a lot. we learned that lat that teems so -- a lot that seems to point to things people might have guessed then. the real answers might be at higher energy. that's not a cop out. all of this is the same general regime, and it's just technology. as i talk a lot about in the book, it's the size of the tunnel that existed that determined what the energy would be for the large had collider. it has to keep protons rotating around. what is the energy based on theory? what is the energy we'd like to study? they said, we're going to build a ring big enough with the existing technology we can get there. here, we were forced, it was a compromise tween what we wanted to do and what we could do with technology. that's the argument that there could be interesting physics right around the corner.

>> i have a hard time conceptualizing anything is small or short as 10 to the minus 19th, so what does a physicist think she's looking at whenning? is that small in dimension? >> well, so, i guess the first thing is let's stop using the word "look". we're not looking. we're not seeing with our eyes. we are making indirect measurements that tell us the properties there so we can conceptualize we can work it out mathematically. i can describe it in words, but that's different than seeing it. a lot of people think that's the only way to understand something is if you see it. i'm happy to have everything consistent and understand it through the fact there's predictions that work, that the formulas work and there's words to describe it. >> so it's only indirect, and not something that the average person is going to think we have to look at --

>> well, you're wearing glasses, so you are seeing somewhat indirectly, and the question is where do you draw the line? you're talking to me 234 -- in a microphone. is that up direct? we're used to that. it doesn't mean it's not real, we just have to be careful when we interpret it. as we know now, after all, our eyes are a form of technology, too. it's -- when we think of something just happening, but there's light rays into it, processed by the brain, there's a lot of processing going on. some is deceptive, in fact, so, again, intuition is guided by what we see, and that's what i tried to get at at the beginning. there's a lot of stuff out there that's real that we just don't have intuition for. >> hi, as the mother three

daughters, one who expressed an interest in being a scientist, can you speak to women in the field of science and are they going into that field and -- >> i think they are in your family. [laughter] >> well, as president obama has said, what do you think is going to be the outcome if we fail to do more investment in education and science as well as research in science as a country? >> well, i think, i mean, i think that's an easy question to answer. i think we all know the failures, and we can figure it out scientifically because look around the globe and say what happens in the countries where they don't invest in science and invest in education? i think most of us would not like those results, so i don't think we have to deduce it. we can do the measurements and

see what happens. i think it's incredibly important that we do that. as far as -- i think there are more. i think in physics it's not changed as much as in some other fields, and i don't have a great answer to why that is. i think, you know, i didn't know i was not supposed to do it, so i am happy. to the extent that people don't know they're not supposed to do it is very helpful. as long as you're not properly socialized, you do really well. i don't really have an answer. >> what would you say encouraged you? >> i like that. it was good to know i liked it. like i said, i didn't know i was not supposed to do it, so i did it. [laughter] >> thank you. >> time for one more if there is one. >> has there been anything that the lhc -- is there anything new

now since it started working 1234 >> we know now a lot of things are wrong, and that's important because when you do experiments, they really do have two worlds, and we knew that when we started experiments. they show things are right and you can verify theory. important to progress is ruling out theories. in some cases, it's ruled out ideas, and in other cases, it ruled out various regimes of parameters and various interaction strains. all of that is progress. it's telling you you can't get away with just anything at all. we know a lot more. it should be born in the mind, and people don't realize this, the lhc1 not running at full energy or intensity. it will close down for a year or so. right now, we're not at the energies where we were completely confident. it's remarkable hoich it's done -- how much it's done given the energy that it has and the way it's going. they are getting more and more

events, and the fact we'll be able to cover the entire higgs regime is really a surprise in some ways. it's doing incredible well, and at higher energy, we'll start looking for discoveries most likely. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> what do you think? was he like other argue tects in his life? he had a very good relationship -- richardson died at 45 or something. >> yeah. i don't think he ever found a partner who he worked with as well as vox and integrated

intines and thought as much as prospect park, and originally it was supposed to be two separate pieces of land with a bridge between it and vox said let's make it one piece of land. vox thought about the landscape and provided ideas. after olmstead had division of labor partnerships. they got along well, but hh richardson designed structures, holmstead thought about land scape, and some had massive egos that they would design a bridge however they felt it should look. holmstead was willing to accept that relationship because, you know, there were not that many visitors in a park, so, yeah. >> yes. i think a lot of interesting other topics came up. the chicago world fair, though, to me was amazing because here

was this guy in his 80s? >> yeah, would have been his 70s. >> late 70s, yeah. >> he was old. >> he was old at that time, and just the fact you mention google, but travel, you know, you have all these commissions -- going on at the same time, and here he is doing this wash job for the chicago -- maybe talk about that. >> sure. holmstead was not as ease in his old age, and that era being in your late 60s or 70s, you were old age and outlived your contemporaries. he did not settle into a restful latter years. he was actually just, he became fevered. the reason he was fevered is because landscape architectture is different from a painting or a work of music because it's not final. he had this real anxiety that after he was gone, all of his work would be undone.

he spent his all adult life fighting against people who were meddling with central park, always his place. everybody wanted to fix something, a race course or something, whatever, always battling to fight those things. he had a sense, particularly because they pee neared -- pioneered it, and they thought everything would be reversed. there's a couple commissions, and the world fairgrounds one of them that late in life, he was desperate to stake his reputation. as an old man in that day, he hurdled all over the united states taking on commissions in milwaukee, kansas city, denver, ashville, north carolina down to the biltmoore estate, worked on the world chicago's fair. he had a formula to give half attention to the chicago's fair, and half attention to the estate

all the way down to north carolina. he used up 100% attention to milwaukee, ect., and what he would do is working on the chicago world fairgrounds and literally when he sensed there was a break in the action, he snuck down to ashville where his client was george vander bilt, his richest clients, and then he traveled around, taking late night rail rides to secure the reputation and make sure he left a big lasting legacy. if he did enough parks, you know, maybe some of them would last. >> and writing letters all the time. i mean, we forgot we send short e-mails that will probably vanish, but as an an architect, it's fabulous. he wrote because. >> he did. it was wonderful.

it was very much a man about talent. he had a lot of friend. the best way to describe it is if holmstead crossed a street, he wrote a variety of letters about it because he was a journalist. he wrote an article writer. there was always -- as a biographer, it created so many takes on any given action, but it was an embarrassment of riches basically to be able to have so many acts in his life for him to account for them and very up sightfully, and -- insightfully, and in long, 10-15 pages of explanation of his being enraged about a park design being rolled back or whatever, and he sent letters, and they respond, and that creates a rich trove to dig into. >> right. nobody will be as easy to follow in the future.

a lot of other people's opinions to back it up. >> check their facebook page. >> right, exactly. [laughter] i wonder what it would look like. >> the entry -- >> he also ate horrible food. his die -- diet was terrible. >> yes. >> interesting you say that because in the early 1890s, he was brought back to prospect park to figure out where the tenant's house should go. he walked around, doesn't like the house because it's a formal piece, but he does say at that time this is the perfect park. now -- [laughter] there is a little preference in your book, i would say significant, for central park. now, as somebody from prospect park who spent 0 -- 30 years there, that that's the

perfect park. he had all this money, complete freedom, and in central park, he a all those people, mr. greene, everybody picking on him, so i don't know. what do you think? >> well, well-played thumper. [laughter] you brought a quotation which i will not be able to counter. [laughter] >> i know that quote, though. >> that's right. i will not dig up a quotation. i found the letter in 1873, he said central park was the best -- >> no. he did love it. >> he certainly did, but he didn't, you know, it's -- but i guess the way that i would attempt to counter that at least is by saying that it's kind of the old, you know, i always think about musicians like paul simon who i heard him interviewed saying, you know, oh, my early work was simon and garfunkel, youthful and at the top of my going, but i have this

kind of feeling that, you know, artists are not the best authority on their own work. i know holmstead felt prospect park was his greatest work, but i'll summon an argument that central park was the masterpiece based on two things. that was his first work. like all artists, that's when all the respondent natety and -- spontaneity and ideas bundle to the surface. that's where he goes from a surveyor turned farmer turned sailor, this, that, and the other, and brings it all to art work. the other suggestion is that central park, i feel, is a particularly masterful design simply because of the constraint. it was a perfect rectangle, terrible shape for a park. prospect park is organic natural shape. >> right.

>> central park, perfect rectangle, terrible piece of land. that's why it was chosen to be a park. a horrible piece of land nobody wanted, and holmstead was faced with that constraint on top of the constraint that the design competition they entered in to had mandatory demands, things that had to be done in order to have design elements for the contest. he was a terribly constrained shape and land, and they brought the best thinking they could to try to make this very constrained space have a flow, have a sense of, you know, of grand and scale, and one thing that strikes me about the park is it's a park that's half a mile wide that means you could not ever be anywhere where you were more than a quarter mile away from civilization, from roads, so it's a considerable illusion you can get lost in the park, be in that park and feel

like you're in nature, so that's my sort of -- >> i'm going to add to that argument, actually, because i'm a fair person. >> i appreciate that. >> is that he also got to keep coming back to it over and over again, so he goes away for a period of time, comes back, and he keeps being brought in for a few questions and then sent away. they take some, but not all, and so i think from holmstead's per perspective he'd say if he had to pick that central park was his baby, his first born, you know, his everything, but i do think that in prospect park we like to say they learned from their mistakes. [laughter] they found somebody who was willing to fund the whole thing and not ask them a single question. they were able to use a lot of the team that they had put together, and i think that's the other thing about holmstead that's so interesting is that his ability