a.m. on monday. you can also watch. ..

if you are just coming and there are seats appear to my left or you can stand off in the corner. or find an open seat towards the back. welcome to politics and prose. thank you over being here. i have mike giarratano and i want to start by welcoming you and saying thanks for being here. on behalf of the new owners bradley graham and the staff here just a collective thanks for supporting the bookstore and supporting the events here. tonight lisa randall and her book "knocking on heaven's door." we are excited to have her here talking about this book. before we begin if you are new here, welcome and i will quickly go over the format, what is going to happen. leases going to present her book and she will talk about her book using visuals as well. what we are going to do is be in the lights of because we are recording so if you do want to get to the corner so you will

have a pretty good view of it. the talk will go for 45 minutes or so and they will have a little time for q&a from you of course. we look forward to your input. it is we are recording as i said we are going to take questions from our audience microphone in the middle aisle so if you can get to that, that would be a help and we will field questions from there. afterwards we will have a book signing up here and lisa will sign books, both of her books "knocking on heaven's door" and passage is available in the front of the store. it's a good time to silence cell phones too and that is how we will go. again, above all i want to say thank's for the turnout a great crowd so will come to politics and prose and welcome to lisa randall. as i said her new book is "knocking on heaven's door" how physics and scientific thinking illuminate the modern world. leases a professor of theoretical -- in this leading theoretical physicist and expert

on the string theory and cosmology. she is one of the most highly cited and influential theoretical physicists. she has appeared in the economist "newsweek," scientific america among many others, many other publications. she has been one of "time" magazine's 100 most influential people. as i said, "knocking on heaven's door" is her second burke. her first book is about the mysteries of the universe in the same dimensions. "knocking on heaven's door" is about the scientific research today specifically the large collider and the investigations into elementary particles of the string theory and cosmology into modern physics from the core knowledge of smaller projects to the outer boundaries of the larger outer threshold beyond. this is her book to present and we are happy that she is here to do that. and again thanks to you for being here. please help me welcome to

politics and prose, lisa randall. [applause] welcome. >> thank you very much. it's a pleasure to be here. so first of all i want to make clear that i don't necessarily see this book is just a book about the large hadron collider. i think it is a book about than a chip science. the large hadron collider is an example of a kind of science i want to talk about what really what i'm trying to do is explain a little bit more of what are the elements that go into science? that's not to say i don't spend a lot of time talking about the large hadron collider in the science going on there as well as what is going on and cosmology and dark matter search is for example but a lot of the more general elements. it's funny because i haven't been to politics and prose before and i thought am i supposed to get a political talk? [laughter] i do speak and prose so i

probably have covered it but really i do think even in that sense, and i think it is really important for people quite generally to start thinking a little bit more scientifically and to understand really what it means in terms of the role uncertainty plays and in terms of what it means to be right and wrong in terms of the role creativity plays in what we do. in terms of a lot of things we don't often associate with science. we often think of it is something where we plug something in a get the answer but there is a lot more going on with that in when science is actually happening, there is a lot more back-and-forth going on and understanding the role of uncertainty is really important as are many other aspects of what i'm going to talk about. by, because is it a short talk, i actually have two different talks that i'm going to be giving. one is more about the large hadron collider in the physics happening there but another is about one of the concepts that is important and that is the concept of scale. and so i'm going to begin the

talk by talking about scale and in the process we will see some of the exciting physics along the way they keep in mind really what i want to get across is why thinking in terms of scale is important not just for physics but for all of science and really more generally. so with that i will actually begin the actual talk. again thank you for having me here. so, the title is "knocking on heaven's door." nine out of 10 people liked the title. some people -- so really what i wanted to get across in the title is really what we are doing. i wanted to convey the fact that we have this very established base of knowledge but we are really trying to go beyond it. we are trying to probe those edges so we are trying to get beyond that and that is what scientists are doing, always trying to get a little bit beyond. when i say how physics and scientific thinking illuminates the universe and the modern world, it is really both physics

that are relevant for understanding the nature of our universe but scientific thinking has much more broader applications and as far as people's understanding. so i'm just going to begin with a the quote from a song. what is so small to you is so large to me. i will make you see so i'd guess that is the goal of my talk. part of what i'm talking about is why these very small objects that get studied in the kind of physics i do, why those objects are relevant to understanding the nature of the world but also by focusing on small issues can sometimes eliminate some bigger things and have to separate out those two. i'm going to just start with a nice photograph someone gave me, a photograph from paris as you might guess 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 with an advertising on it or four minutes and it has in paris that has cars on the streets. so this kind of a typical paris scene. so what do i want to get across here? well the thing i want to get across is what you see depends on how you look at things, what resolution you have, what scale 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 have just had a map of france he would hardly notice it was there. it clearly, that would not be a way to know about the eiffel tower. you wouldn't know it is existing in the aspect of physics that we don't know about until you zoom into that scale but of course i could look very close and then i would see nothing that conveys the beauty and elegance.

i would see the grid of the iron works. i'd be able to study the detailed structure but if i wanted to study the eiffel tower there is an appropriate scale for that and when i use that scale i don't necessarily want to take into account all the little details. of course i could zoom in closer into that iron and look at atoms and molecules but that is not relevant. i'm thinking on a particular scale. what i really wanted to see you to see a mudslide which is more important is if you send in you would see my name on it. [laughter] so what i'm going to spend the top doing is getting into the point of understanding how my name and it's up in paris. it is washed out by the lights but if you look right here -- [laughter] so we will come back to that at the end of the top.

for now let's just think about scale. i think it is a really important concept in one of the reasons i wanted to focus on this was when i talked about war passages i think a lot of people even those who are extremely interested in the kind of science i do i think it is kind of a misconception sometimes about how does this relate to the kinds of things we see? these exotic ideas of extra dimension but how can there be a continuous transition from these very exotic ideas that applied to a very tiny scale and what we see on human scales. our intuition is of course guided by what we see on human scales. when we think, when we think of other types of physics people think it's almost magical or it not real because it's not what they see in their daily lives but of course anyone who is who's seen an optical illusion knows that you can't always trust your eyes. in fact what you can trust the things you can measure and record and make many measurements up and do it consistently and get the same answer. at night not be what is

intuitive in the sense that it isn't what you see every day when he walked down the street but that does not mean it's not there. it just means it's not obvious to us as human beings and i think that is important to get across at the physics in describing the world whether we see it as human beings and our challenge is to get that information out to be able to interpret things you can make as technology advances to understand what's going on. what i'm saying in the this light is our vision, there is official light spectrum. is relatively narrow and of course if you go to scale, that are smaller than the few hundred meters we are talking about, you are not going to be able to literally see something. your visible light is not going to have a sensitivity to see things so that means when we see things come apart a colliders we are not saying it in in a way which is visually do. it would have to be more indirect measurement and the history of measurement going from direct to indirect measurements is interesting.

it at the time of galileo when he had his microscope, it was the first time people were using lenses as an intermediate device. since then we have had more and more distance in some sense from what we see but nonetheless there is a very rigid connection between what these devices are measuring and what we see. and in fact the physical universe involves and a more -- enormous scale. there are many different skills and many inches dinkins happening on them so first before you go on i want to take a brief tour of the scales just a weekend set the landscape to know what we are talking about. so of course we could start a very large scale. in principle scales can be infinitely large. we have no idea how big it is but we can talk about 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. that is up at the top. it is 10 to the 27th. there are two ways things can be smaller. one is that you can be looking back into the earlier universe and so i have on the slide the universe when radiation was emitted when it was smaller but of course we have many objects and the sky in those objects are various sizes. we can talk about galaxies. we can talk about the solar system. we can talk about the earth's orbit. there are many different sizes and it's banning a huge range of scales. one thing that is interesting about the scales is it's really the same losses of physics. we are not finding we need to adjust below the physics as we go to different scales. if you go to high density we might need to use general relatively but generally the laws of gravity we are all familiar with. it's a little bit different in

principle if you look at the smaller scale because we think of going out big 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 the small scales and that is a challenge to me as a writer to convey what's going on on the small-scale because it is not as intuitive so you need ways to think about it but what is also interesting is you actually do very scale but then you get to scales where atomic might be a better description so they have changed the nature of the way you are going to describe using classical physics to quantum physics and so one thing i want to get across is what that means. does that mean one is right in what is wrong? what is going on there? one scale i want to focus on here is the scale for the padron collider measurements. if you are wondering what that is, there is a big ring underneath the ground. we will come back to that later

but that picture is representing the large hadron collider and then there's the frontier scale in terms of what we can actually look at with experiments. that is the frontier energy scale for experiments and that is 10 to the 19th meters. that is far slower than anything we can imagine seeing. nonetheless we are about to learn about those distant scales from high-energy experiments being performed there. in this chart, i also talk about some other scales. those scales are even smaller than the scales to large hadron collider can explore. there are many smaller scales you can think about. those are not experimentally explored at any time in the future. nonetheless there can be interesting physics happening there and in fact there's probably a limit to the scale we can talk about, to the distant scales we can talk about and i will come back to that later. there's this enormous range, even below so we are probing

this incredibly small scale right now, tend to the 19th minus 19 meters but that is not even near the end of the scales. one question we want to keep in mind is how can we talk about things with all these unknowns? how can we direct all this stuff that is yet unknown? fifth there are few things that are striking there. one is that is a lot of information. how can we wrap our head around that? how can we keep track of everything that's going on? that's a lot of information and furthermore we saw the different physical descriptions enter. we are using quantum mechanics for other scales and if we really kept going down in scale we might need to have something called quantum gravity which combines quantum mechanics and gravity in a way that works over the entire range of scales what is going on? what do we mean by this? so we really want a theoretical tool for for organizing

information and that is we as -- that is what we as physicist do. we have a tool used for that and i want to get across to you what i mean by an effective theory. what do we mean? the solution sounds obvious in some sense. there is all the stuff out there but let's just keep track of what we need to keep track of. let's keep track of the effect this quantity relevant to operations. that is to say if i can't measure something, maybe i don't have to use that in my description. maybe i can just absorb it and bundle it up into the quantity that i can measure that turns it into a retractable problem where you don't get caught with unnecessary details. so i think this is kind of a generally obvious concept that you are using all the time without even realizing it. if you want to find politics and prose if you are starting from sufficiently far away you wide

want to first find washington d.c. so you might have a map or politics and prose is not showing up on the map on the left. that's a very different scale you are looking at their and where you are looking on the right-hand side when you want to do -- make nowhere to go on military road. you focus and so in some cases you are going to keep track of each individual street but in that description you are not keeping track of each individual street. you are just keeping track of the larger global structure that is how we do it. if we try to find their way across the country using a street map that would be impractical. but nonetheless we all know we can get there using the map on the left and then when we need to, zoning in on the map on the right. and i think, i'm sure many of you come from different backgrounds. and it is a very general way of thinking. you identify the scales to the problem at hand. if you are doing literature you might do very close reading where you focus on the individual words and what is going on there or you might focus on the big picture, the

big story. in biology we are now seeing that some people will do molecular biology but then he left integrate that information to some sort of larger bigger picture. you might have some sort of system biology and psychology and every time -- my kind of motive but you might focus on individual elements or try to put together in this bigger picture. and it would not hurt. thinking about what is going on in the world today. so let's just take a physics analogy, a simple physics example. suppose i threw a ball and i wanted to find out where the ball and. i'm not going to figure the ball in terms of an atomic structure and i'm not really going to worry about the electrons inside. i'm going to think of it as the ball and it works. it works fine and actually that's the way physics works. you are doing effective theories without really knowing about it. noonan did not say i'm going to be clever and ignore of a quantum mechanical structures that are inside.

he could figure out what was happening if you through ball in the measurements would never be able to distinguish the fact that it was a ball and there was a structure and so it was completely irrelevant. even now when we know of all this underlying structure, we don't use it when we calculate the trajectory of the ball. if we have a ball involving adams we will use quantum mechanics but we will not be using them. does not make a difference. so in some sense both theories are correct. you can say that quantum mechanics is the more fundamental theory. that is really what is going on. in fact in principle, physics is an approximation of quantum physics but in some sense it's entirely correct for the uses that he would want to do. you could send to a a man to the moon using classical physics. so it works. it's effective and if you don't actually measure anything that tells you the difference, then you are 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, where you do need to do something different and that is how you advance. what happens when you do that is the old theory gets up sought -- absorbed into the new theory. it's not necessarily wrong but it won't apply over the entire regime. that is really how it works. and in this, what's important is stating when you make the measurement what is the accuracy with which i've made that measurement and overwrought regime vested apply because it is the uncertainty that's left over where there is room for something new. if you don't have a measuring tools, if you are not looking at the scales you might not care but at some point you were going to get there and you will find out something new that is going on. that is the way physics progressives and i want you to think of the physics we are doing today in that context. this is what i just said. distance in this case, scale, distance scale is essential as an organizing tool.

again, you would never want to calculate the direction of a ball based on atomics. you would never get the answer. so as i said the effective theory ideas really the key to progress in that is always will we have in the back of our mind. everyone is using effective theory all the time. it's just physicists give it a name and we know we are using it. for physicists it's really a systematic thing. we can say exactly what the certainty is that allows and we have a finite number of primers. we can make predictions within the effective theory and we can also tell when it is going to write down so it's a very systematic way of doing what we all do intuitively. as i said sometimes the theory of the smaller scale is known in which case you might be able to derive what's in your effective theory for more fundamental physics and sometimes it's not than you can just work in terms of those quantities themselves.

so you always want to keep the old ideas as long as they are correct. sometimes things can turn out to be wrong but if you have ideas that have been established over time that make successful projections they are right when you find something new when they cease to apply. in this case a smaller distance scale. so they adams are inside the ball but within the atom and this is making sure everyone knows what is inside of an atom you find a smaller structure so in you probe inside of an atom you find its name itself is not fundamental and we know it is made of nuclei with electrons going around it and those nuclei or are not fundamental either. they are protons and neutrons in those protons and neutrons are not fundamental. they are objects which are inside the proton and the neutron and those are held together through a force known

as a strong quark and that is what we have in the proton and a neutron. i just want to point out, when i wrote my first book i realized i didn't read many of these books and i thought maybe i should glance over a few of them to see what people do so i looked at it in a book by jared donald. was written in 1947. it's a very good book but there is a fantastic quote in it. i will you think about it for a minute. instead of a large number of indivisible atoms of classical physics we are left with three essentially different entities, protons electrons and neutrons. bless it seems we have actually hit the bottom in our search for the basic elements of which matter is formed. so i hope some of you see the irony in this quote. they just discover these new underlying elements and they thought okay we have the answer. somehow we found a smaller scale and it's very unlikely i would say that any of us are living in

a time where we got to all the answers and rory and. as we develop tools to look inside, we find there is new structure and that keeps happening. it would be rather incredible if we had found the bottom. so i do find it ironic that in a time when we are so excited about having found this new structure, the idea is that we have further structure but we don't have the tools yet to find. and of course as we know, not only are their neutrons but also quarks that are inside as we just discussed. quarks are interesting because they are theoretical motivations verified by experiment. again that is the other important thing that i think gets lost because physics is so remote. inoa sounds abstract we believe when there's a connection between a theory and experiment and we have a unifying framework, economically unifying framework for which we can make predictions that work and that is what the standard does. tells you about quarks,

particles like electrons and the forces through which they interact and there are many ways to contested at a high level. where we are looking now is to go beyond it. how do we go beyond it? we are at the front or energy scale now. this is where we are looking at something called the large hadron collider. it means law rich. patch on as a general name given for objects that interact via you are a strong force like photons and it is colliding together, a large bundle of protons at high energy and it is colliding inside of a collider. is not a very pretty name but it is the name and it's the large hadron collider. what you have is this huge underground tunnel. 27 collmenter sensor conference and there are a few rings. the protons get accelerated in progressive ways may finally collide together at high energy and they really come in my book

i joke that it don't like to use superlatives but you are forced to use superlatives because it really is the highest energy machine, the highest intensity machine. everything that went into it has an amazing backing. everything about it is reaching extremes to try to get to as high energy and as high intensity as we can can do with available technology. on an industrial scale. i'm just going to show you a little bit about what happens. it comes in a linear accelerator and then it goes around some little rings and the protons are going to go down this tunnel. this you can actually walk around. i've walked around. you go into, and hear the protons enter a collision region. will around the collision region they had an haven't experiment among those protons collide they go outward through the experiment and so the various

layers as you go out transversely or measuring various aspects. so not only is the lac and amazing machine but within that there are amazing detectors. the ones that i am most interested in are known as atlas and -- the ideas that if it's something that they are going to find that no matter what it is so they have different layers to measure as much as possible about these particles to measure charge, to measure momentum, to measure energy, to measure whether it is intractably a strong force and that is with the seductress do so we are very excited about what is going on there. this is the frontier energy scale. we know about the standard model and we are try to answer questions that go beyond the standard model. what are those questions? what do we think we might learn there? one of the things we are pretty sure we will learn is how to particles acquire mass, fundamental particle -- acquire mass? it turns out that in the

description of these particles if you didn't have this extra mechanism which might've heard of called the hitt isism named after peter higgs, futures were down the theory he would make nonsensical projections of high-energy. just wouldn't make sense. the theory can't be a simple theory with the fundamental methods. there has to be something more just and going on in that march's thinking is called the higgs mechanism which i'm not going to explain in detail but i have a whole chapter the book where i explain what it means in terms of articles. in addition to that, there is another puzzle which is okay particles get their mass but why are the masses what they are? what sets the scale for those masses? in fact it's a real puzzle if you just use quantum field theory which is what we use that combines together special relativity and quantum mechanics to do particle physics. it's what what we do and we believe is right but if you were

to calculate how heavy you think these masses should be you would find that there is a discrepancy of 16 orders of magnitude. it makes the theory work and it looks like you have to do an enormous budget or what we call fine-tuning. i'm glad you are laughing because we think it is laughable too. we don't think it is what is really going on. we think there has to be more adjusting structure that's their and that more adjusting structure something i talked about in my previous book. could he something, an extension of asymmetry or could be something as exotic as an extra dimension of space. we could be finding evidence of that if it does answer the question of why the mass is -- it should have consequences as a large hadron collider so these are two things we think it is going to do. one is understand the higgs mechanism what it is that implements it, is there a particle known as the higgs mechanism and also what is it

that gives particles their mass? it seems as likely to be something rather interesting and the consistent theory is we thought of certainly has these very interesting aspects that can tell us about the nature of space in time. the other thing it might do, what we might do with a large hadron collider is learned about the nature of dark matter. that's not necessarily true but it does turn out. what is dark matter? dark matter is just like we have, it aggregates in clumps but it doesn't interact with light. it interacts gravitationally but not with light. we call it dark matter but it is really transparent matter because we do see dark things. dark matter really does not interact with light at all if. that is the distinguishing feature of dark matter. nonetheless, maybe it has a little bit of interaction with the stuff we see an impact there is a compelling reason to think that if it has a mass, that we

are talking about the lac is exploring where particles require their mass it looks like you might have the right amount of dark matter and right now their experiments there experiments looking for dark matter that has the mass being explored by the large hadron collider. the large hadron collider has quite a bit to tell us about the niche of what is out there. is not just looking for particles. is really looking for forces and descriptions. it to be something more adjusting. what governs the operation of our universe? but of course many of you have also heard other questions and i want to emphasize these are questions that won't necessarily be explored in experiment and that we don't know how to explore experiment in most cases but people nonetheless are studying it through theory and one of the questions is what would be a consistent very to combine together quantum mechanics and gravity? now i say as a theoretical

puzzle for the following recent. any of the experiments we do we can do without entering the discussion. again we go back to the effective field theory idea. string theory is not necessarily having any impact on any experiments we are doing. is as fundamental underlying structure that we are not get measuring. so that means we can use quantum mechanics. we can use relativity to predict things depending on whether we are looking at large or small scales. it's only when you get to these very tiny scales, tend to the minus 33-degree centimeters which is far beyond that tend the 10 to the minus 17 centimeters where we get to enormously high energies that you would need to know the answers to the question if you want to do an experiment. nonetheless the fact that we don't know how to make addictions tells us, at least that there is a theory that underlies what we see so it is still a puzzle. there is definitely a question to the answer but it's not a question that will necessarily have an effect on the

experiments we are doing which is in fact hearing disability. the fact that an effective theory can't tell the difference if its fundamental strings are fundamental particles. that means is hard to measure but it also is why we can go ahead and do an experiment and interpret them in terms of our effective theory which you all understand. i'm just going to mention for the fun of it that it even seems like it could be a final short distance frontier since we have explored all the distances. it looks like at this point, there is a distance scale known as planck scale. it is often the scale you hear associated with quantum gravity but also in principle we don't know how to go come even if i were to do a side experiment and ask how can i make a measurement at a scale smaller than the length scale, how would i do it? ordinarily when we think about going to small distance scale to think about going to

high-energy. why do we do that? if you think of a high energy wave it off so it's a lot. it is a short wavelength because there are many oscillations. so if you have a short wavelength you can probe small structures. unique variation on the scale in order to probe that structure. if you had low energy and a big wavelength you wouldn't be able to measure anything within is so generally we think by going to high-energy you can probe the short distance structure. at the planck scale that breaks down and it breaks down for very interesting recent. if you were to go to a high enough energy to be able to probe smaller than the planck scale you have put so much energy inside such a small scale that you would have a black hole. if you have a black hole, it just gets bigger and bigger. even in principle, even in an experiment we don't know how to study those for distances so it is not relevant to anything going on today but it is very interesting things and it seems

there is a limit or there could be a limit to where really talk about it in conventional terms. after completing the story of scale i thought i should tell you that little nugget. let's come back to what we are doing today. we know how it works so we expect there is more that lifespan. they are questions we don't have answers to necessarily, why are the masses they are? so we hope that by studying higher energies a new regime we have not yet explored in the greater precision, we will be able to see these little telltale signs that tell us what lies beyond the standard model. so we use effective theory, what is known as the tep scale, the large-scale the large hadron collider is exploring. and maybe we will find is more fundamental description. maybe we will find some structure we haven't yet explored.

so the challenge is to measure precisely enough that we see the effective theory scale. that is where we understand effective theory when we understand and reveal the more fundamental sub-- for evidence of that. so i'm going to just say one theory that i've worked on but in order to be that i want to tell you more about the scale. i'm not going to go into detail but i want to give you a picture of the exciting thing that we might hope to learn about the large hadron collider. the first question since we are talking about scale, the absolute distance scale. einstein's theory of general relativity tells us how that works and in fact before and since theory we talked about energy differences. that's probably what you learned about in high school but the absolute value of energy is important because it shows you about the nature of space in time by telling you about the

metrics and so let's think about what a metric is. metric is meeting to scale. basically you have a ruler. if i say something is -- that would not mean anything. do i need to mild, two centimeters? what do i mean? if i were ruler it establishes units that i can tell you. the metrics tells you what that number of means in terms of an actual distance. there something else going on when you have the metric. the metric also tells you about the coverage or of space which has to do with angles. is it like a sphere? is it like a saddle on a horse? is it just flat like the tabletop? it is also very important information and of course it is very hard to picture that curvature of a three-dimensional space so i don't recommend you do that necessarily. but we can't think about what curvature means by going down one dimension and looking at two-dimensional services and three-dimensional space to see

what it looks like so you see positively, negatively and flat surface pictures. in the same way we can have three-dimensional space have curvature and that overture is important because it tells us about the nature of gravity. we can think of particles going through space and following the most efficient path within the curb space and that mimics the effect of gravity. so for example if i had things coming in here, if i had something coming it would naturally be attracted to the center so we can understand the attraction of a planet for us in terms of warping the space time around the planet for example. so this curvature, basically energy warps the space or gives curvature to the space and that curvature tells you how gravity will affect something moving through that space time. and that is what this is showing. so if you had a bowl for example, of course it's at two-dimensional analogy. is not really was going on but he gives you a place for was going on can -- because you can

imagine it is going to be attracted towards the center and how attracted his bets on how it is. you have a high mass neutron it will be curve much more and it will have much gravitational attraction. if you have a black hole it could be even more. the thing i'm going to tell you about very briefly and probably will be a little confusing because i had to write an entire book to explain it but i want to give you a flavor. what we considered as the idea that there could need not just the three dimensions we know now but actually an additional dimension of space we don't see. why we don't see it, there could be many different reasons but one, probably the most intuitive is it could be very tiny. in this case space so warped we don't see it as dimension. nonetheless it could have physical effects on our universe and in particular could tell us something very interesting about gravity.

it could either that yvette space, time is warped or curved in such a way that how you measure things depends on where you are and that is why you want to talk about what scale is. it could be that things look very heavy so gravity would have a very big influence on the gravity bring here but if i move through the extra dimension, could be that the scale changes. that is what the metric and, and that is actually what we found. with salty equation of general relativity in this context of having an x. or dimension beyond what we see and three-dimensional worlds at the end of it so those brains at the end, brain stands for membrane. it's a lower dimensional surface and higher dimensional space. they can be in extra dimension and of course it looks three-dimensional to us but gravity could extend throughout the other dimension and that fact could explain why masses are what they are because it could be we are living in the

portion of extra dimensional space or masses would end up being what they are not this much bigger value that we think we calculate when we use quantum field theory. it should be confusing so don't feel badly if it's confusing. is a very exciting possibility when we consider the gravity of extra dimension. the thing i want to emphasize here is that as exotic and as crazy as this idea might sound, because it is answering the question about mass, that the large hadron collider is exploring we really have a chance of knowing whether this is right by doing measurements as the large hadron collider even something as exotic as the warped dimensional theory. and this is just to say why do we even bother considering action dimensions in the first place? you might ask why vegans out there and one reason is just the spirit of inquiry. a baby in a crib explores their two dimensions but my older sister would always try to climb

out of her crib. they want to explore the third dimension. that one is pretty obvious there but there could be than other dimensions, the dimensions we don't see and we are only going to know about them if we explore them. we don't know for sure that they don't exist so we can only find out if they do by and shooting the possibility that they exist and seeing what would happen if they did. in fact einstein's theory of gravity works for any number of dimensions. doesn't only were further to three-dimensional state so we do not do the calculation that doesn't tell us the answer to how many dimensions there are. another reason is actually the string theory. the string theory combines quantum mechanics and gravity but it is only consistent if there are extra dimensions of space so if you are string theorist you are forced to consider the possibility that there could be the section of dimensions. the other reason is the one i just gave you. it has the possibility of explaining connections among physical tremors in our universe and that makes it worth

exploring. baby is so hard to find the answer. people have been looking for the answers his question about math and a smart physicist has been looking for this answer for a few decades now and we don't know what it is. there's no theory that is so simple and beautiful and is worth considering a slightly more exotic possibility and then telling the experimenters how to look where it. that is one of the roles we had here is play. we can say if this were the answer, this is what you should find and the experiments of the large hadron collider are tough so it's good to have targets and say what it is that they want to look for. and this is again the idea that gravity could be very strong on the gravity brain and very weak on the weak brained where we live. you know that he codas -- so this is where we live in gravity could be much weaker than it is on the gravity brain. here is the experimental technology, just to tell you i'm not cheating you. there could be particles that actually travel in the extra

dimension. now we don't see an extra dimension so what would we see? we would see particles that have properties of ones that we know about, but they would seem to have bigger mass because we would interpret this momentum of the extra dimension as mass because we don't see the dimension. what the experiments are looking for are particles that have properties like the ones we know about but they are heavier. looking for heavier particles so if you ask how much heavier they should be again this is the large map or the large hadron collider to explore because it is answering the question about particle masses we know about. this particular scenario if it is answering this question the large hadron collider should find these particles. so these are a lot of ideas. it's a lot of stuff. but i think for me it was important to say these more conceptual ideas about scale, about what is right and wrong

combined together with when we are doing science. i think is really important and maybe we will even show it to be real and it is certainly the fruit for creative endeavor but i thought i went to talk i talking about their applications of these ideas and art projects because it was a lot of fun. i actually think it's a good time to be thinking about the intersection of art and science and i don't think all of it is great. sum of it is terrible but some of it is really interesting because what is our do? it absorbs the closer the time and there are all these interesting scientific ideas and it's interesting to do them. i'm going to briefly mention a gallery show and also i'm going to come back to that but i that i mentioned in the beginning. so the show we did was called measure to measure and here's the idea we had. a lot of the time art and science intersect. you take arden try to make some signs thing look artistic or you

try to take some science idea or an artistic idea and see if there is any science in it and that is really her. what if you took a theme that artists and scientists could think about it and scale is one of them. it is essential to the way artists are thinking and central to the way scientists are thinking. when we work for the los angeles art association, we asked them to try to incorporate some of the ideas but also what a scientist would think about it and where scientists one of the important ideas was the idea was a earlier that if you look at small scales, things can look very different than they do in large scales. when i look at this table i don't see atoms. i see a table yet if i were able to probe inside i would see something very different. so i'm just going to give you a couple of samples briefly of what people came up with. the ones looking at the tree itself. if you look at the bark on the right, of course it doesn't really give you the field of a large sequoia tree. sort of like the eiffel tower.

i just like showing this because i think it's fantastic. she had alice in wonderland. she is actually carving the pictures, cutting them out so they become one big thing so you have this thing that is and integrates an union of all the little pictures so you have these individual pictures but then it turns into something different when it is all put together. i will show one more where it looks like it is some pop art thing but if you -- it is a picture of her face. it almost looks like someone staring at you so you can see it is all integrated from her features. you see something very different if you look at the tiny scale if you were standing next to it. if you have a resolution to see that which we don't on this slide unfortunate and if you look on another scale. there were not -- other pieces of art as well. the other thing i want to tell

you about is what we call the projective opera. when i wrote my first book were passages it was about the extra dimension of space are gorgeous briefly outlined and he read it and he is the composer who works in aircon. he had wanted to do something about the intersection of art and science. and to view science as the motivation and he wanted it to motivate expanding his repertoire so he like the idea of working with physical theory. i just finished writing this book which was hard to organize all these ideas into a linear fashion. such a liberating thought to be able to say you could have many different voices. you can add music, get a pardon he can afford to give an idea of course you are not teaching a lesson but to try to give an idea of what the physics is about. also was why are we doing this? y. explored? why do we think there is more out there? we ended up writing the small opera which is why we had

that -- it was about this question is the difference between someone who thinks they have all the answers who lives in the three-dimensional world and someone who thinks there is more. i'm just going to and and play some of it because it is kind of fun. ♪ >> it was actually a staged reading but they moved around a little bit and she is able to explore the extra dimension and he is in the lower dimensional world. her voice is very different than his and that was one of the things he wanted to explore to give to go in and explore. so he is, master richie did the sets and he has a bridgette mitt likes to use of the baritone is really in his lower dimensional world as she goes out and explores. he does not understand why she would want to do that. why can't you just financers here?

is also a little bit about what experiments do. the difference between someone who could really go out and explore something and someone who stays home and has to see things indirectly and how can they eventually pieced together that same information? how can they believe it when they can't actually go and explore? she has this technique because at epicenter there was not an orchestra pit for an opera so we actually had screens where there were observers behind it. you can see her world is there and it might be hard for you to see this bright room in this world is more black-and-white. and so i'm not going to go through the whole thing here. i have to say was pretty fun writing this thing and seeing it. it really was kind of beautiful to watch. to put together a story.

you can see she is exploring this action dimension that he can't get to. they actually wanted equations. i was a comp -- uncomfortable with equation sorts of the composer if you want to pick out equations that will fit them in there so he went and figured out which ones he wanted. one of the things that was interesting about that, a lot of times when you see art or music about scientists, and they rarely show them doing science so it was fun to try to have even in an abstract way a little bit of an idea of what the science is going on. so i will just let it play out.

i think it is pretty clear and this is really something i want to get across. why do think there is more there? every time we have left you find there is there and so it would be unlikely there isn't and we have these definite questions that we know there should be answers to. so it is a really exciting time now because the large hadron collider is working. is exploring these energies. dark matter experience are probing some of the things we think are there and we are trying to fit it all together and that is what makes it so exciting. so i like this picture i have -- happen to see in the tape one time when is there and i like it because it conveys this image of his lower dimensional world and its rich three-dimensional world that could be out there. this thick world in this rich world that was there. i did noted the time but it turns out the picture is near the large hadron collider. i will just let this play out and maybe even stop it and say thank you. [applause]

>> thank you lisa. let's take a few questions from the mic and we will talk. let's take 10 minutes and take maybe three or four questions. >> thanks lisa. i like -- books too. rescinds new scientist scalise grossman talks about the small unexplored range of the lhc between 115 and 145. you have electron volts. >> are you talking about the higgs? >> right. at the higgs turns out not to be there, does that affect your thoughts on a theory with an action dimension or two? >> well, i tried to separate the issues. there are two issues going on. one is what gives particle mass

and so one thing that is interesting, so let me just focus on the issue of the higgs first. what does it mean? right-hand people are getting a little worried or at least they say we we are getting worried because were closing in on the mass range. that is what the large hadron collider is designed to do. it has only one mass that is out there and we are supposed to find out what it is. if you asked people before they turned on the large hadron collator what they thought that mass would be most of them would have thought it's his value that has not yet been tested. i think without any additional data, so if you really believe that was right, you wouldn't be at all disturbed now. you would say, this is not the mass i thought it should be out and they haven't explored it yet. guice is still disturbing? until we have experiments that would really note -- knew the answer so you can think -- say i think it means -- but i could be wrong so maybe i feel a little safer there is a little bit of upper room and there could be more value. the fact is a lot of those values are now not possible so

it is zoning in on the region we think is interesting and over the course of the next year we might actually know the answer to whether, the conventional simplest version of the higgs is there but one of the things is why are we doing the search? we don't actually know even if the higgs mechanism is right, we don't know what it is that implements that higgs mechanism. could be the simplest model that gives the predictions we can really know very well. higgs interacts with massa we know it's indirections precisely. heavy particles are more for example because they have more mass but it could be something more subtle that has to do with underlined the higgs mechanism and if that is the case it's not clear that these experiments so far would have been testing it. could be that the case is just something different or could be heavier, that had stronger interaction so we are really, so i view we are learning about the nature of what hicks could be. after all right now we can say,

i can pretend that we don't find the higgs close enough. what it is that gives consistently particles their mass. all of us can now seven no one has an answer so a lot of people think the higgs mechanism is right but the question is what it is for cicely that is implementing it. >> if i can ask another one. in the future, if at some point i guess the lhc will probably run out of things to look for, but what will be the argument for building a larger excelerator? >> okay, so right now, i myself would feel much more sanguine that we would be able to answer all these questions about the higgs that you just asked about the extra measures if we had three times the energy. it is a very rough argument. we know basically energies where think should appear but we don't know precisely where the energy should appear and for us as

theorists, it is sort of the same theory but from an experimenter's point of view have gone yaupon from a regime weekend find a regime we don't have any hope at all. so the large hadron collider will do a lot of exploration but it's not clear that it will explore everything because you need a lot of energy and what we have seen so far, the large hadron collider is making that 25 years ago, over 25 years ago. we have learned a lot this seems to point to things being heavier than thing -- thibault may have guessed them. the real estimate may be just a bit higher. all of this is the same general regime managed as technology as they talk a lot about in the book. it's the size of the time of that existed that determines what the energy would be for the large hadron collider. the highest could be consistent with magnets that have to keep the protons rotating around in those rings. with the fsc they said what is

the energy based on theory? what is the energy we really would like to study and they said we are going to build a ring that is big enough with existing technology we can get there. here we were forced. was a compromise -- not compromise with doing what wants to do and what we could do with technology so that is the argument, that there could be very interesting physics right around the corner. >> i have a hard time conceptualizing anything as small or short as 10 to the minus 17 or tend to the minus 19, so what does a physicist think she is looking at when something is that small and dimension? >> so i guess the first thing is let's stop using the word look. because we are not looking and i try to emphasize, we we are not seeing with our eyes. we are making in direct -- to tell us the properties of what water there so we can conceptualize and work it out mathematically. i can describe it in words but

that is different than seeing it so i think a lot of people tend to think that the only way to understand something, if you see it. i am very happy to just have everything be consistent and understand it through the fact that there are predictions that work. the formulas that work. there aren't even any words to describe it. >> the average person is going to think we have to look at it. >> well, you are wearing glasses so you are seeing it somewhat indirectly in the question is where you draw the line? you are talking to me and a microphone. in direct. so we are used to that but it doesn't mean it's not real. it just means we have to be careful when we interpret it as we do when we see -- as we know now when we understand biology better and better our eyes are in some sense a form of technology too. ..

one who has expressed an interest in scientists. could you speak to women in the field of finance but which are either going into the field and larger numbers and about -- >> i think they're in your family. for the mac has this has, what do you think is the outcome if we fail to do more investment in

education and science ethologists research and science. >> well, that's an easy question to answer. speaking of here out scientifically amok around the globe and what happens in most countries ready to don't invest in science, where they don't invest in education? most of his would not like results. so i don't think we have to do is because we can get the measurements as it happens. so i think it's incredibly important we do that. i think there are more. in physics is still hasn't changed as much as some of the hills. i don't have a good answer why that is. didn't know i wasn't supposed as i was perfectly happy to the extent people to other not supposed to do it a couple. the site is your properly socialized to do really well. so i don't really have an answer. >> were reduced to encourage you

quite >> i liked it. i would good at good at it and it leaked it. i do know is that supposed to do it so i didn't appear [laughter] [inaudible] >> i was just wondering, has there been anything that the lhc has showed up -- is there anything new you know now since i started working? >> mostly been a lot of things around. this is important because when you do experiments they really do have two rules. even kelley anew when he experiments they show things writing you consider a theory. but as important as ruling out theories. in some cases it's actually ruled out ideas in some cases it is rolled out various prescience of parameters of massive attractions transparent at all

that is progress because it tells you can't do with just anything at all. so we know a lot more. it should be borne in mind all people don't seem to realize it. it's going to close down for a year or so indebted to the requirement. so right now we are not where we were completely confident. it is remarkable how much it's done given the energy that it has been given the way it's going. they get more and more events than the fact it will be able to cover the entire regime as a possibility is really a surprise in some ways. it's two incredibly well. when it comes to higher energy were looking for a new discovery methodically. >> thank you very much. [applause]

>> tell us about what he has said what he does. he said he is the most complex individual that you have written about in any of your books. take that mark zuckerberg. tell us about him and would mainly attracted you to tell his story. >> said roberts came from a very hard pacrim from a fundamentalist mormon family. he was kicked out of his house when he was 18 for admitting to premarital not appear in and then he decided he wanted to be mastered and changed changed his whole life in a changing on a nature to geology and astronomy at university of utah and learned how to fly airplanes and scuba dive spoke five languages and miniconvention johnson space number come at a for kids. he was achieving his dream. he was a standout player. he's a big star and became a social leader of all the co-op

city and and then he fell in love with a young intern and we've all done something out of love. well, what had roberts did with stole moon rocks from his professor's office and i think i've come to spread them a bed, had sex with his girlfriend and try to sell them on the internet to a ultram gem dealer whose name was axel ammerman. you couldn't have invented this guy. [laughter] this guy has never been out in his life. he collects rocks and trades them every monday night in the huge center where all the guys straight rock. his party is popinjay, which i'd never heard of. it is a sport where there is a wooden bird on a 100-foot pole and all these and stand around and shoot at it with crossbows. this is a real sport i'd never heard of. so he sees the set on the internet appeared out of the box for sale. and he is a big believer in right and wrong, so he immediately called the fbi in

tampa and it became this big sting operation. and had roberts was taken down. i always give it away, but she know he was arrested. >> you obviously have come off of enormous success with not only the book, but also the fact they are then converted to movies which obviously helps in terms of that notoriety. >> there was change the titles of my movie so that's really annoying. so "sex on the moon" is the first one i feel they have to keep here to >> they are locked in on that one. you said you were working on this at the time the social network was being filmed, so there's some overlap. at that time i was not in the way that actors and actresses are only as good as the rules they choose, writers are only as good as the stories they pay very so what was it? all you explain notwithstanding the stories you could've told, what was what attracted you to this particular topic?

>> for me the stories come to me. i don't look for them anymore. ever since bringing down the house to get 20 or 30 e-mails a week. every college kid who does something crazy will call me. i always wanted to write about nasa. i think it's amazing. many think of nasa you think of the 60s. tom hanks in a silver capsule. in this let me inside nasa today. so you just got out of prison. he was on probation and it was weird because i've never met someone who'd spent almost a decade in prison before sawyer mention me to a crowded hotel lobby -- [laughter] he was the nicest, most charismatic good-looking and smart guy who did something. >> the nicest that when you do. >> he really was. i was amazed no one had written about the story. it was one article in "the l.a. times" commending the texas had more stuff, but i've not seen anything about this. i couldn't believe it so the

first thing i did was filed a freedom of information act with the fbi to get the fbi file, which is thousands of pages. i even when the fbi agents to come down they were wearing wires and i got the transcripts have everything set on the wires in the first thing he says what he wants into the restaurant is if you are wearing a wire, i am screwed. that's okay. so was i. zero. it was a year-long interviewing everyone i could. >> so there's one section of the book which i think it's great for there is a correspondence between the fad who is going by the name were brought in sin. >> word overspend with a geologist it turns out. the mac which i didn't know. but you are reprinting e-mails. >> ammerman was very excited i was writing this book. nasa gave them as a gift for solving them in the cape verde named an asteroid after him.

there is an asteroid floating around the sun somewhere. everything in the book is reprinted directly in a lot of the dialogue is actually straight from the transcripts and everything. i do get attacked a lot in the press for my style, which is a very kind of turn not back cinematic way of telling a nonfiction story. but the reality is everything in here is from ohio. >> were you brought that up and that's something i want to visit a little bit. certainly that cannot a lot in bringing down the house. can you talk about that technique that you employ as a writer cut your controversial technique. but how you employ that and why. i have to say in "the new york times" review that came out yesterday -- >> jesse hates me. >> she hated you. i think i was the hangover from that. tell me why you do it that way. >> it's been that way my entire

career. on the cinematic tinkering that's the stuff i like to read. it's a form of new journalism that i get all of the information. i interview just about everybody, thousands of pages of court documents and then i sit down until the story in a very visual way. they are going to be journalists who do not like it. certainly janet matlin was not one of them. i don't necessarily write or her peer right for me and people like that. the reality is is a true string is history as everything else. you see a a biography of cleopatra. come on, nobody knows anything about cleopatra. >> did you see a biography of abraham lincoln and, you know, obama's biography has invented characters. it is a process. you have to take the facts and write it in a certain way. i choose to write it in a cinematic way. so for instance, i will interview thad roberts, the

other kid there, the sky court in his later the book. i know what was said, but i doubt on the exact words. so when journalists may say they talked about routes, but to me that's a very boring and weak way of telling that scene. i know they talked about rocks and i know what they describe what they did with moon rocks and there is some journalists who have been some who don't enable via controversy forever in terms of certain journalists will never like it. but the social network, mark zuckerberg came out and said it's not true and collimated jackie collins of silicon valley, which has loved actually. >> that's great. but he never pointed out anything that wasn't true. and then he said he didn't read the book so i don't know where you go with that.

so i think the reality is there's a very true story. he meant to have sex i'm moon rocks because he wanted to have sex on the new. john maslin had a problem with this scene scene you just put them under the mattress. but that's actually not true. he did this on purpose or use the facts, but a talented nice title. some people i can table tome. >> you can watch this and other programs online at the tv.org. pingback from not coming here's my question. it has sort of a breezy optimism to it. you write a one point and i'm quoting here, the innovative capitalist culture will allow us

to make a houdini style escape from climate change is most devastating impacts. what makes you so sure of that? >> my mother always told me to avoid wishful thinking. that was to be provocative to see if folks are weak. i take credit change very seriously now that my two minutes is up -- i love good jokes. folks, i take credit change very seriously. my optimism is really attached core of my optimism and i don't want you to walk away thinking i am in the optimists. when we anticipate a challenge that our minds in the world to 7 million people, perhaps 9 million people have enough of us are scared and aware of the challenge the climate change poses, to be kidding for the addressing dressing doom add-on is anticipating