no one knew what to do or how accountability was going to take place. people using public resources to rebuild the finding of a public good and working on behalf of the public who were not public officials. they were volunteers. heads of non-profit organizations. they're reading of public funds, the public didn't necessarily have oversight. today we have these measures, indicators and reporting systems that are a bit onerous for a lot of folks but it does provide a little more. >> host: thank you for your time. >> now on booktv, lisa randall looks at the contributions civics and scientific thinking have made to our understanding of the universe. this is a little over an hour.

>> good evening. we will get started. there are seats up here to my left her new costanza off to the corner and find an open seat for the back. welcome to politics and prose. thank you for being here. i want to start by welcoming you and saying thanks for being here on behalf of bradley graham, and the staff here, collective thanks for supporting the event series here and being here for lisa randall's book "knocking on heaven's door". we're excited to be talking about this book. if you are new here, welcome. i will go over the format. what is going to happen. lisa will present her book and talk about her book using some visuals as well.

what we are going to do is leave the lights up because we are recording. if you do want to get to the corner so you have a pretty good view of it, the talk will go about 45 minutes. we have a little time for q&a from you. we look forward to your input. we are going to take questions from the audience microphone in the middle aisle. if you can get to that, that would be a help. we will field questions from there. afterwards we will have a book signing up here. lisa will sign her book "knocking on heaven's door" available in the front of the store. that is how we will go. a good time to silence cellphone too. that is how we will go. so again above all, just want to say thanks. nice turn out and great crowd so welcome to politics and prose and welcome to lisa randall. her new book is "knocking on heaven's door" clippers and how physics and scientific thinking

the eliminate the universe and of the modern world. lisa is a professor of theoretical physics at harvard university and is a leading theoretical physicist and expert on particle physics legal string theory and cosmology. she is one of the most highly cited and influential theoretical physicists. she has appeared in discovery economist this week, scientific american among many others, many other publications. she has been one of time magazine's most influential people. "knocking on heaven's door" is her second book. surfaced book warped passages is about the mysteries of the universe seen in dimensions. "knocking on heaven's door" is about scientific research today specifically at the large hadron collider. the author's investigation into elementary particles and string theory of cosmology into modern physics from the core knowledge, smallest objects to the outer boundaries, larger threshold and beyond our understanding. this is her book to present and we are happy she is here to do

that. thanks to you for being here. please help me welcome to politics and prose lisa randall. [applause] >> thank you very much. it is a pleasure to be here. first of all i want to make clear i don't necessarily see this book as just a book about the large hadron collider. i think it is a book about the nature of science. the large hadron collider is an example of the kind of science i want to talk about but what i am trying to do is explain a little bit more. what are the elements of thinking that go into science? not to set don't spend a lot of time talking about the large hadron collider and the science going on as well as cosmology and dark matter there's a lot of more general elements. i have not been to politics and prose before.

emma supposed to give a political talk? i do speak in prose so that works out. but really i do think even in that sense it is imported for people to start thinking a little bit more scientifically and understand what it means in terms of the role uncertainty place in terms of right and wrong and will creativity place in what we do. in terms of a lot of things we don't often associate with science. we think of something where we plug something in and 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 and understanding the role of uncertainty is important as are many other aspect of what i am going to talk about. but because it is only a short talk i will give a talk about a large hadron collider and what

is happening there but another is one of the concept that is important in physics which is the concept of scale. i am going to begin the talk by talking about scale land in the process we will see the exciting physics along away but keep in mind what i want to get across is why thinking in terms of scale is important not just for physics but all science. with that i will actually begin the actual talk. thank you for having me here. the title is "knocking on heaven's door". my friends -- ten of nine people like the title. something that tried to double cut. whar wanted to get across is what we are doing. i wanted to convey the fact we have this very established a base of knowledge but we are trying to go beyond it and probe the edges. we're trying to get beyond that. always tried to get a little bit beyond. that is what i had in mind.

how physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and modern world it is both physics that is relevant for understanding the nature of the universe but scientific thinking has much broader applications and worth understanding. so we will begin with a quote from a song. what is those small to you is so large to me. last things i do i will make you see. that is the goal of my talk. part of what i am talking about is why these very small objects that gets the lead in the physics and particles by those objects are relevant to understanding the nature of the world but while focusing aluminate some bigger things and how to separate those two. i am going to start with those photographs someone gave me from

paris as you might have guessed. you can tell because it has a lot of iconic features. it has the eiffel tower in the background. it has a kiosk on it. advertising performance. it has cars on the streets which is very typical. it is a typical paris scene. where do i want to get across here? 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. if you think about the eiffel tower you can look at it from very far away in which case if you had a map of france you would hardly notice it was there. that would not be a way to know about the eiffel tower. you wouldn't know of existence. the way many aspects of physics we don't know about until we really zoom in to that scale.

i could look very close and nothing conveys the beauty and elegance, the grid of the ironwork or study the detailed structure. if i wanted to show the eiffel tower there's an appropriate scale and when i use that scale i don't necessarily take into account all little details. i could zoom in even closer and look at atoms and molecules that that is not relevant to. not what i am thinking of. i'm thinking of a particular scale. what i wanted you to see in that slot which is more important is if you zoomed in you would see my name on it. what i will spend the talk doing is getting to the point of understanding how my name ended up here in paris. if you look right there, that is

my name. okay. we will come back to that at the end of the talk. for now let's just think about scale. i think it is an important concept and one of the reason i wanted to focus on this is what i talked-about warped passages a lot of people, even those who were interested, there's a misconception sometimes about how does this relate to the things we see? instead of exotic ideas of extra dimensions but how can there be a continuous transition from the very exotic ideas on a tiny scale and what we see on human scale and our intuition is guided by what we see on human scales. when we think of other things people think it is almost magical or not real because it is not what they see in their daily lives but anyone who has seen an optical illusion knows that you can't always trust your eyes. would you contrast are things you can measure and record and

make many measurements of and to consistently and get the same answer. it might not be what is intuitive in the sense that it isn't what you see every day when you walk on the streets but that doesn't mean it is not there. it is just not obvious to us as human beings. that is important to get across. the physics described in the world whether or not we as human beings -- our challenge is to get that information out and interpret things as technology advances to understand what is going on. our vision, there is a visible light spectrum, drugs of the narrow and if you go to scales that are smaller than the few hundred nanometers we are talking about, you are not going to literally see something. to visible light is not going to have the sensitivity. so when we see things we are not seeing it the way we traditionally do. it has to be something we

consider more indirect measurement. the history of measurement going from direct to indirect measurement is interesting even at the time of galileo when he had his telescope and microscope. this was the first time people using lenses as an intermediate device. even precision measurements were not using intermediate devices. since that we have had more distance from what we see but nonetheless a very rigid connection between what these devices are measuring and what we see. in fact the physical universe involves an enormous range of scale far greater than the mm to kilometre that we can wrap are heads around. many interesting things happening on them. before i go on i want to take a brief tour of the scales to set the landscape. to know what we are talking about. we could start at large scales. in principle scales could 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 we can see given the speed of light and the length of time the universe has existed. that is 10-27 meters. you talk about the universe you have to be careful because there are two way things can be smaller. you could be looking back into the early universe. so i have on the slide some radiation was emitted when it was smaller but of course we have many objects and the size of those objects are various sizes. we could talk about galaxies and the full system and the earth's orbit, many sizes spanning a huge range of scales. when the thing that is interesting about these scales this is the same laws of physics that are applying over those scales. we are not finding we need to adjust the laws of physics as we go to different scales. if we go to high density we might need to use general

relativity but we're using the laws of gravity that we're all familiar with. it is a little different in principle if you look at smaller scales because we think of going out big but you can also go inside. a lot of that is much harder to visualize. much harder to visualize a small scale. that is a challenge to me as a writer to convey what is going on on small-scale because it isn't as intuitive. we need to think about it. what is also interesting is you have human scales we are familiar with. but you get to scales where atomic physics is a better description of quantum mechanics is a better description of those scales. you change the nature of the way you're going to describe classical physics the quantum physics. i want to get across what that means. does anyone is right is what is wrong? one scale i want to focus on here is the scale for the large

hadron collider measurements. if you wonder what that is there is of big ring underground. we will come back to that later but that picture is representing the large hadron collider. that is the frontier scale in terms of what we can actually look at with experiments. that is the frontier energy scale for experiments. that is 10 to the-19 centimeters. that is smaller than anything we can imagine actually seeing. we are about to learn about those distance scales from high-energy experiments being performed there. in this chart i talk about other scales. those scales are even smaller than the scale large hadron collider can explore. there are smaller scales you can think about. those are not experimental explored in the near future as far as we know. there could be interesting physics happening there. probably even a limit to the scale we talk about to the distance scale we can talk about

and i will come back to that later. there is this enormous range even below. we are probing this incredibly small scale, tend to be-19 meters. that is not even near the end of scales we look for. the one question we want to keep in mind is how can we talk about things with all these unknowns? huckabee do physics with what is not yet known? a few things are striking. one is that is a lot of information. how can we wrap are head around this? how can we keep track of what is going on? that is a lot of information. we have different physical descriptions. we say we are using classical mechanics on some scale and quantum mechanics another scales. if we kept going down a scale we might have something called quantum gravity which would work

over the entire range of scales. what do we mean by this? we really want a theoretical tool for organizing information. we have a tool for organizing information known as an effective theory. i want to get across to you what i mean by that. what do we mean? the solution sound obvious in some sense. all this stuff out there but let's keep track of what we need to keep track of. let's keep track of the effective quantity relevant to observation. that is to say if i can't measure something maybe i don't have to use that in my description. maybe i could absorber it, bundle it up into quantities i can measure and that turned into intractable problem where you don't get caught with the necessary details. so this is a generally obvious concept that we use without

realizing it. you want to define politics and prose look at from sufficiently far way you want to find washington d.c. so you have a map where politics and prose is not showing up on the map on the left. it is a different scale you are looking at than where you are looking on the right hand side where you want to know when you are on military road. what you want to do is focus in. in some cases you keep track of each individual street but in that description your not keeping track of each individual street. your keeping track of the larger more global structure. that is how we do it. if we find our way across the country using a street map that will be impractical. nonetheless we know we can get there using the map on the left and when we need to zoning in on the map on the right. i am sure many of your from different backgrounds. is a general way of thinking. you identify the scale for the problem at hand.

if you're doing literature you might do close reading where you focus on the individual words or you might focus on the big picture. the big story. biology, we are now seeing some people will the molecular biology but you have to integrate that into some sort of larger bigger picture. system biology and psychology and every mode of thought you focus on these individual elements or try to put it together. it wouldn't hurt to think about what is going on in the world today. so let's take a physics example. suppose i threw a ball and wanted to figure out where the ball lands. am not going to think of the ball in terms of its atomic structure. i am not going to worry about the quirks and electrons inside. i think led as a ball and it works. you do effective theory without

knowing it. ignore the quantum mechanical structure inside. figure out what would happen if you threw a ball when the measurements made at the time would never distinguish the fact that it was a ball and there is a ton of structure. it would be completely irrelevant. even now when we know a ball's underlying structure we don't use it when we calculate the trajectory of the ball. if we have a problem involving adamas we will do quantum mechanics but we won't use it for that. doesn't make a difference. in some sense both theories are correct. you consider quantum mechanics is the more fundamental theory. that is really what is going on. in principle classical physics is an approximation of quantum physics but in some sense it is entirely correct for the uses you want. you could send a man to the moon using classical physics. it works. it is effective. if you don't measure anything

that tells you the different than you are not going to need to use it. the history of physics is making progress. what happens is you come to the point where it breaks down and you do need to do something different and how you advance. what happens when you do that is the old theory gets absorbed into the new theory. not necessarily wrong but it won't apply over the entire regime you think about. that is how it works. in this what happens is stating when you make a measurement, what is the accuracy with which i made that measurement and what regime does it apply? the little uncertainty that is left over leaves room for something new. if you don't have measuring tools or looking at those scales you might not care but at some point you will get there and need to find something else going on. that is the way physics works. think of the physics we are doing today in that context. service is what i just said.

the distance in this case, distance scale is essential as an organizing tool. you would never calculate the trajectory of a ball based on atomic physics. you would never get the answer. so as i said the effective theory idea is the key to progress. that is in the back of our mind. everyone is using effective theory all the time until physicist give it a name and we know we are using it. because for physicists it is a systematic thing. we can say with the uncertainty is, a finite number that can make predictions within effective theory and also tell when it is going to breakdown. systematic way of doing what we do. as i said sometimes the theory on a smaller scale is known in which case you might be able to derive your effective theory

from fundamental physics and sometimes it is not any work in terms of those systems themselves. so you want to keep the old ideas. sometimes things turn out to be wrong but if you have ideas that have been established over time that make successful predictions they are right in a sense and you can advance when you find something new and they cease to apply. so we set atoms inside balls but within the atom, make sure everyone knows what is inside the adam you find smaller structure. when you probe inside and adam you find despite its name is not fundamental. it is made of nuclei with electrons spinning around it. those nuclei are not fundamental either. their protons and neutrons. and protons and neutrons are not fundamental.

there are objects called clark --quarks which are held together by the strong force and that is what we have when we have a proton or neutron. i want to point out a quote when i wrote my first book that didn't actually read many of these books. i thought i should last through a few to see what people do. i looked at one book that was really funny because it was written in 1947. very good book but a fantastic quote and it. and will let you think about it for a minute. it says instead of rather large number of indivisible adams of classical physics we are left with three essentially different entities. protons legal electrons and neutrinos. it seems we have hit the bottom in our search for the basic elements of which matter is formed. i hope some of you see the irony in this quote. they had just discovered these

new underlying elements and said we have the answers. we found but smallest scale. it is very unlikely i would say any of a fair living in a time when we really got to all the answers. we develop tools to look inside we find there is a new structure and that keeps happening. it would be rather incredible if we have found the bottom. i do find it ironic that at a time we're so excited about finding this new structure you dismiss the idea there could be further structures that he didn't have the tools yet to find. as we know not only are there neutrons but also quarks as we just discussed. they with the radical but then verified by experiments. that is the important thing that gets lost. even though it sounds abstract we really believe there's a connection between the theory and experiment and have the

unifying framework for which we can make many predictions that work. that is what the standard model of particle physics does. it tells you about quarks and particles like the electron called leptons and the forces they interact and are many ways it has been tested. we are looking to go beyond this. how do we go beyond it? we are at the frontier energy scale. we're looking at the large hadron collider. large mean large. hadron is a general name given for objects that interact via the strong force like protons and it is colliding together with other protons at very high energies and colliding in a collider. it is not a pretty name but it is the name. the large hadron collider. so you have a huge underground tunnel, 27 kilometers in circumference.

there are a few rings that protons that accelerated in successive waves and finally collided together and really high energy and it really -- in my book i joke i don't like to use the probative when you talk about -- it really is the highest energy machine, highest intensity machine. everything that went into it is the coldest place on earth, amazing vacuum. everything about it is reaching extremes to get to the high intensity as we can do with available technology. on an industrial scale. so i am going to show you what happens. it comes in a linear accelerator and those other rings and then around the l ac rain and then the approach and go down the tunnel and you can walk around. i have walked around it. you go into -- the protons and her a collision region and around the collision region not

surprisingly they have experiments and when those protons collide they go through the experiment and various layers as you go out are measuring various aspects. not only is it an amazing machine but within it there are amazing detectors. the ones i'm most interested in art general purpose detectors. if there's something new they are going to find it no matter what it is. they have different ways to measure as much as possible about these particles to measure charge, momentum, energy in, whether it is interesting by strong force and that is what these detectors do. this is the frontier energy scale. we know about the standard model and answer questions that go beyond the standard model. what are the questions? what do we think we might learn? one of the things we are pretty sure we will learn is how do

particles acquire mass? fundamental elementary particles are choirmaster? sound like a strange thing. we think of things as just having mass but it turned out in the theoretical description of these particles if you didn't have this extra mechanism which you might have heard of called the higgs mechanism named after peter higgs, he rode down the theory with massive particle's bleak as the we would make nonsensical prediction that high energy. it wouldn't make sense. the theory can't possibly just a simple theory with these fundamental methods. there has to be something more interesting going on and that is called the higgs mechanism. i'm not going to explain it in detail but i have a chapter in the book explaining what it means. in addition to that there is another puzzle, why are the masses what they are? with the scale for those masses? it is a real puzzle if you just use quantum field theory which is what we use that combines

together special relativity and quantum mechanics. what we do and we believe it is right but if you were to calculate how heavy you think the match should be you would find there's a discrepancy of 15 orders of magnitude. it makes the theory work. looks like you have to do an enormous fraud or what we call fine-tuning. ..

it seems as likely it's likely to be something rather interesting and the consistent very. we had thought of have these very interesting aspects that can tell us more about the nature of space and time. the other thing it might do with a 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? dark matter is matter like we have, aggregates. but it doesn't interact with light. percolated directs gravitationally but not with life which of course makes it hard to see. picola dark matter but it's really transparent matter because we do see dark things. they absorb light so dark matter doesn't interact with light at all. that is the distinguishing feature of dark matter. nonetheless, maybe it has a

little bit of interaction with the stuff we see and in fact there's a compelling reason to think that if it has a mass, that we are talking about the lhc where particles acquire them as it looks like he might have the right amount of dark matter and right now there are experiments out there that are looking for that kind of thing. they're looking for dark matter that has the mass being explored at the large hadron collider. the large hadron collider has the potential to tell us quite a bit about the nature of what's out there. it's not just looking for particles. is really looking for forces and descriptions. it could be something much more interesting. what are the fundamental interactions that govern the operation of our universe? of course many of you have heard about other questions and i want to emphasize these are questions that won't necessarily be explored in experiments. in fact we don't know how to explore with experiments in most cases but people among the lesser studying it through theory and one of the questions is what would be a consistent theory to combine together

quantum mechanics and gravity? now i say it's a theoretical possibility for a following recent. in experiments we do we can do without answering this question. again we go back to the effective field theory idea. string theory is not having any impact on any experiments we are doing because it's the fundamental underlying structure that we are not yet 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 scale. it's only when we get to these very tiny distance scales, tend 10 to the minus 33-degree centimeters. we get to enormously high energies that you would need to know the answers if you were to do an experiment. nonetheless the fact that we don't know how to make predictions tells us at least that there is a theory that underlies what we see. so it's still a puzzle and there is definitely question to be

answered but it's not a question that will necessarily have an effect on the experiments we are doing which is in fact makes it hard to see. the fact that the effective theory can't tell a difference if its fundamental strings are fundamental particles. that means it's hard to measure but also why we can go ahead and do an experiment, experiments 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 there is at this point, there is a distance scale known as the planck scale and it's often a scale you hear associated with quantum gravity. but it's also, we don't even know in principle how to go, even if i were to do a science experiment and ask how can i make a measurement on a say it -- scales smaller than the

planck scale? how they do it? ordinarily when we think about going to small distance scales we think about high energies. why do we do that? if you think of a high-energy wave it has a very short wavelength if you have a high-energy wave because there are many oscillations. if you have a short wavelength, you can probe small structures. you can continue variation to probe that structure. if you have a low-energy and and a big way think he wouldn't be able to measure anything within it. so generally we think going through high energies we can probe the structure. at the planck scale that breaks down and it brings down for an interesting recent. if you were to go to a high enough energy to be able to probe smaller than the planck scale you a party put so much energy inside such a small scale that you would have a black hole. if you have a black hole in the ad more energy it just gets bigger and bigger so even in principle, even in an experiment we don't know how to study the circumstances so it's not

relevant to anything going on today but it's a very interesting thing. seems there is actually limit or there could be a limit to where we would talk about space in conventional terms. i should tell you that little nugget. let's come back to what we are doing today. we know how the standard model works so we expect there is more than life beyond. they are questions we don't have answers to necessarily. dewire the masses what they are? so we hope that by studying at higher energies a new regime we have not yet yet explored and the greater precision reducing uncertainty we will be able to see these telltale signs that tell us what life beyond the standard model. so we use effective theories with what is known as the tev scale, the large-scale the hadron collider is exploring. it's a unit of energy that the particles of energy used. and maybe we will find this or

fundamental description. maybe we will find substructure we haven't yet explored. so the challenge is to measure precisely and not that we see the effective theory scale. that is when we really understand the effective theory, when we understand what its true limits are and reveal them -- the more fundamental description for evidence of that. so i'm going to say one theory that i've worked on but in order to do that i want to tell you a little more about the scale. i'm not going to go to detail that i want to give you a picture of this exciting thing that they might hope to learn about the large hadron collider and then i'm going to go back and tell you -- so the first question since we are talking about scale, the absolute distance scale and the theory of general relativity tells us how that works. we talked about energy differences. that's probably what you learned in high school but the absolute value is important because it

tells you about the nature of and time and it tells you about the metrics so let's think about what a metric is. a metric is meeting to scale. basically you have a ruler, right. if i say something is to a part that wouldn't mean anything. do i mean two miles, do i mean to centimeters? what do i mean so if i have a ruler it establishes units that i can tell you so mad tricks tells you what that number means in terms of an actual system. that there something else going on when you have the metrics. the metrics also tell you about the curvature of space which helps you with angles between things. is it like a sphere? is it like a saddle on a horse? is it just flat like the tabletop? that is also important information. of course it's a very hard picture, the curb richard of a three-dimensional space so i don't recommend you do that necessarily that we can think about what curvature means by

going going down one dimension so we can see what it looks like so you see positively, negatively and a flat surface and in that same way we can have three-dimensional space and that curvature tells us about the nature of gravity. we can think of particles going through a curve 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 pummeling and i have something coming and it would naturally be attracted to the center so we can understand the attraction say of a planet for us in terms of warping the space time around the planet for examples of this curvature, basically and energy warps the space or gets curvature to the space and that curvature tells you how gravity will affect something in that space and. and that's what this is showing so if you have some ball for

example it will give -- a two dimensional analogy. it gives you a flavor for what's going on because you can imagine something were to compare of course it's going to be attracted towards the center and how attracted it is depends on how heavy do so if you have a high mass neutron it is going to be curved much more and have much longer gravitational pull. if you have a black hole that's even more. so the thing i'm going to tell you about briefly and probably will be a little confusing because i have written an entire book to explain it but i just want to give you a flavor. what we consider is the idea that there could be not just the three dimensions we know about but else -- actually a 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 can be very tiny but in this case it can be so warped we don't see that as a shell dimension. nonetheless it could have physical effects on our universe

and in particular could tell us something very interesting about gravity. it could be that space, time is warped or curved in such a way that how you measure things depends on where you are and that's what i want to talk about what scale is. it could be that things look very heavy so gravity would have a big influence if i'm on what is called the gravity range here but if i move through the extra dimension it could be that the scale changes. that is with a metric until mean that is what we found. resolve the equation of general relativity in the context of having an extra dimension beyond what we see and three-dimensional worlds so brain stands for membranes so it's a lower dimensional surface and a higher dimensional space. they can be an x. or dimension just on the weak brained so it looks three-dimensional to us but gravity could extend throughout the other dimension

and that could explain why masses are the way they are. it could be we are living in the portion of extra dimensional space where masses would end up being what they are not this bigger value that we calculate when we use quantum field very. it should be confusing so don't feel badly if it's confusing. it's a very exciting possibility when we consider the gravity of extra dimension. the thing i want to emphasize here is as exotic and crazy as this idea might sound, because it is answering the question about maths that the large hadron collider is exploring, we really have a chance of knowing whether this is right by doing measurements at the large hadron collider, even a something as this warps dimensional theory. and this is just to say why do we even bother considering extra measurement in the first place? why we even got there. one reason is the spirit of

inquiry. if you are a baby in a crib they explore their two dimensions but my older sister would always try to climb out of her crib because they want to explore the third dimension. a sort of want to explore the other dimension. that was pretty obvious that there could be even other dimensions we don't see. we are only going to know about them if we explore them. we don't know for sure they don't exist so we can only find out if they do by entertaining the possibility that they exist in seeing what would happen if they did. in fact einstein's theory of gravity works for any number of dimensions. does not have work for three dimensions of space. it 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 that it is actually only consistent if there are extra dimensions of space so if you are a string theorist you are forced to consider the possibility that there could be this extra dimension that the other reason is the one i just gave you. it has the possibility of

explaining connections among physical parameters in our universe and that makes it worth exploring. may be so hard to find the answer. people i've been looking for an answer to this question about maths and a smart physicist has been looking for this answer for a few decades down we don't know what it is still. there is no theory that is obvious and beautiful so it's worth considering a slightly more exotic possibility and then telling the experimenters had a look for it. that is one of the role we as theorists play. we can say if this were the answer this is what you should find and the experiments are tough so it's good to have targets that they want to look for. and this is again the idea that gravity could be very strong on the gravity grade and weak on the week rain and you know that because this is where we live in gravity can be much weaker than it is on the gravity range. and here's the experimental signal just to tell you i'm not

cheating you. there could be particles that actually travel in the extra dimension. we don't see an extra dimension so what would we see? we would see her particles that are properties of ones that we know about but they would seem to have a good mass. we would interpret this momentum of the extra dimension as mass because we don't see the dimension so what the experiments are excellent looking for are particles that are properties like the ones we know about that they are heavier so we are looking for heavier particles and if you ask how heavy they should be again this is just the right bass for the large hadron collector to explore because it's answering questions about the particle masses we know about so in this particular scenario that is answering the 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 how these more

conceptual ideas about scale, about what is right or wrong combine together with what we see all the time when we are doing sides and i think it's important. maybe we will even show it to be real. but i thought i would and it taught by talking of other applications of these ideas and art projects because they are a lot of fun. 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. some of it is terrible but some of it's really interesting because what desire do? it absorbs the culture of the time and interesting scientific ideas. i'm going to briefly mention the gallery show and also i'm going to come back to the -- that i mentioned in the beginning. so the show we did was called measure to measure and here was the idea we had. a lot of the time art and

science intersects you take hard and you try to make some signs thing look artistic or you try to take some science, an artistic idea and see if there is any signs of that is really hard but what if you take took a thing that artist and scientist with thing about and scala circling one of them. it's very is very central to the way artists are thinking and central to the way scientists are thinking so we put out a call and we asked them to try to incorporate some of the ideas on what a scientist would think about and one of the important ideas was the idea we saw earlier that if you look at small scale, things can look very different than they do in large-scale and when i look at this table i don't see atoms come 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 examples with what people came up with. with. the one is just looking at the tree itself. if you look at the bark on the right of course it doesn't

really give you the feel of the large sequoia tree, sort of like the eiffel tower. i just like showing this because i think it's fantastic. this is just one of -- old book. a she has actually carved the picture so they become one big thing so you have this thing that integrates union of all the little picture so again you have this individual picture but then it turns into something very different what it's all put together. i will show one more where it looks like some pop art thing but if you actually zoom in close which unfortunately i don't have here, it's actually pictures of her face so it almost looks like someone is staring at you if you look close. you can't see it but it is all integrated from various features so again you see something different if you look at the tiny scale. if you have the resolution to see at which we don't unfortunately, or if you look at it on a larger scale.

the other thing i want to tell you about is what we call the projective opera. so when i wrote my first book, was about the extra dimension of space. i just briefly outlined it. and he read it and he was the composer who works at aircon. he wanted to do something about the intersection of art and science. he wants you science as a motivation for electronic music and want to motivate expanding his repertoire. he liked the idea of working with physical theory and i tried very hard to organize all these ideas into a linear fashion. it was such a liberating thought to be able to say you could have many different voices, you can add music and art and words and try to give an idea. of course you are not teaching a lesson but to try to give an idea of what physics is about but also important to me was why are we doing this? why explore? why we think there's more out there so we ended up writing a

small opera premiered at the center which is why we had that piece there. it was about this question of 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. the composer went out into the two-dimensional world so i'm just going to and this and play some of it as it's kind of fun. it was actually a stage 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 be able to go unexplored. so he is in this sort of bridge image that he liked to use. the baritone is really in this lower dimensional world and she goes out and explores.

she doesn't understand what he would want to do that. why can't you just find the answers here? it's also a little bit about what experiments do, the difference between someone who can go out and explore something in someone who is staying home and has to see things in directly and how can they eventually pieced together that same information? how can they believe it when they can't actually go unexplored? oneworld is more black-and-whitt has this technique. there was an orchestra pit for the orchestra so we had to invent the orchestra behind it. you can see her world is greene they are and it might be hard for you to see in this bridegroom and his world is more black-and-white. and so i'm not going to go through the whole thing here. i have to say it was pretty fun. interesting seeing these people sing about this and it really was kind of beautiful to watch.

to put together this story. she is essentially exploring this next dimension that he can't get to. and they actually wanted equation. i was a little uncomfortable with the equation so i told the composer of you want to pick out an equation i will fit it in there so he figured out which ones he wanted. [laughter] actually one of the things that was interesting about that, a lot of times when you see art or music about scientists, they rarely show them doing science so it is kind of fun to actually have even in an abstract way a little bit of an idea of what the science is that is going on.

so i will just conclude and let it play out like why saying that i think it's pretty clear and this is really what i want to get across why do we think there is more there? every time we have looked, we find there is more 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's really a very exciting time now because the large hadron colliders working, and is exploring these energies. dark matter energies are probing some of the things we think are there and we try to fit it all together and that is what makes it so exciting. i would just -- i like it because it conveys this image of this lower dimensional world in this rich three-dimensional world that could be out there, this rich world that was there and i didn't know at the time but it turns out that the picture is actually very near the large hadron colliders so it seemed appropriate. i will just let this play out and maybe even stop it and say

thank you. [applause] >> thank you. let's take a few questions with the mic and talk informally. we will ask lisa three or four questions. >> thanks lisette. i like iris books too. a recent new scientist lisa grossman talks about the small unexplored range of the lhc between 115 and 145. you have electron volts. >> you are talking about the higgs very. >> higgs turns out not to be there does that affect your thoughts on a ferry with an extra dimension or two? >> well, i tried to separate out these issues.

there are two issues going on. one is what his particles of mass and one is, so one thing that is interesting, so let me just focus on the issue of the higgs first. right now people are getting a little worried or at least they say we are getting worried because we are closing in on the mass range. acid that is what the large hadron colliders excited to do. it has only one massive it is out there and it is supposed to find out what it is. if you asked people before they turned on the large hadron colliders what they thought that mass might be most of them would have thought if this value that has not been tested. i think without any additional data they would have said, so if you believe that was right he wouldn't be at all disturb. you would say this is not the mass i thought it should be out. why is it still disturbing? until we have experiments no one really knows the answers so you can say i think the mass might be 116 geb but i could be wrong and so i feel safer if there is a little bit of offer rim and

there could be more value. the fact is a lot of those 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 actually know the answer to whether the -- the conventional simplest verse of the higgs is there. we don't actually know, even if the higgs mechanism is right we don't know what it is that implements the higgs mechanism. it could be the simplest model that gives the predictions we can really know very well because the higgs interacts with mass so we we know it's and directions precisely and it interacts with heavier particles more because they have more mass but it could be something a little more subtle that has -- that underlies the higgs mechanism and if that is the case it's not clear that these experiments would have been testing it. it could be that it decays into something different or a bit

heavier that has had stronger interaction so it could be something different so i view as we are learning about the nature of what higgs could be. after alright now we can say, i can pretend that we don't find the higgs -- what it is that consistently gives particles their mass and no one has an answer to it so i think a lot of people think the higgs mechanism is right that the question is what it is precisely that is implementing it. >> if i could ask another one. in the future, if at some point i guess they lhc will probably run out of things to look for, but what will be the argument for building a larger accelerator? >> 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's a very rough argument. we know basically the energy is

where things should appear but we don't know precisely where they should appear and for us as theorists a factor of two a sort of the same theory but from an experiment source point of view have gone from urging we can find a regime we don't have any hope at all. sowed the large hadron collider will do a lot of exploration but it's not clear that it will actually explore everything because you need a lot of energy and what we have seen so far, the large hadron colliders started making that 25 years ago, over 25 years ago. since then we have learned a lot. we have learned a lot that seems to point to things being heavier than people might have guessed so that is the argument that the real answers might be even higher and i'm not just doing that is a copout. all of it is the same general regime and is just technology. as i talk a lot about in the book, it's the tunnel that existed that determined what the energy would be for the large hadron collider. it's consistent with magnets to

keep the protons rotating around in those rings. with the sse they said what is the energy based on? what is the energy we really would like to study and they said we are going to build a ring that's big enough with existing technology we can get there. here we were forced, it was a compromise between what we wanted to do with the experiment and what we could do with technology. so that is the argument, that there could be interesting -- because it's right around the corner. >> i have a hard time conceptualizing anything as small or as short as 10 to the minus 17 or 10 to the minus 19, so what does a physicists 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 love. we are not looking and i try to emphasize we are not seeing with our eyes. we are making measurements that tell us the properties of what's

there so we can conceptualize and work it out mathematically. i can describe in words but that's different than seeing it. so i think a lot of people tend to think that's 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 and there aren't even 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 actually seeing somewhat indirect rate and the question is where you do you draw the line? you are talking were talking to me and a microphone. indirect. 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 they see -- i mean as we understand biology better and better after all our eyes are in some sense a former technology to so when we think of it as something happening but of

course there are large -- light race going into it and there is a lot of processing going on. some of it is deceptive in fact so again our intuition is guided by what we see and that is what i try to get it at the beginning but there's a lot of stuff out there that is real but we just don't have our intuition for. >> hi. as the mother, my daughter who is an engineer and the grandmother of three daughters, one who has expressed an interest in being a scientist, could you speak to women in the field of science and are they going into that field in larger numbers? >> i think they are in your family. [laughter] >> sps president obama says, what do you think is going to be the outcome if we fail to do

more investment in education and science as well as in just research in science as a country? >> well i think that is an easy question to answer. i think we know what they failure isn't a think we can figure it out scientifically because we can look around the globe and say what happens in the countries where they don't invest in science and where they don't invest in education and i think most of us would not like those results so i don't even think -- in many cases we can do the measurements and see what happens so it is incredibly important we do that. i think there are more. physics still hasn't 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 perfectly happy. to the extent that people don't no they are not supposed to do it, that's very healthy. as long as you are not properly socialized you do very well.

so i don't really have an answer. >> what would you say encouraged you to go into it? >> i like it. like i said i did not know i wasn't supposed to do it, so i did it. [laughter] >> thank you. >> time for one more. who all has a question here? >> i be i was just wondering, has there have been anything then they -- that the lhc has shown up? is there anything new since it started working? >> mostly what we knew was a lot of things are wrong and this is something that's very important because when you do experiments, they really do have two roles and even galileo when he first started doing experiments, they show things are right. you can verify. but that's important to progress as ruling out theories. in this case, in some cases it is a role that idea in some cases it is just ruled out very short shames of parameters, massachusetts and interaction at

all that progress as it it is telling you you can't get away with just anything at all so we know a lot more. it should be borne in mind in people don't all seem to realize this, it is not running at full intensity. is going to close down for a year or so and get to this premise the right now we are not yet at the energies where we are completely confident. is actually remarkable how much it has done given the energy that it has been hasn't given the way -- they are getting more and more at events in the fact that we will be able to cover the entire higgs regime at least as a possibility is really a surprise in some ways. is doing incredibly well and when it comes in to high energy we will be able to start looking for -- [applause] >> you are watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span2's booktv. >> tell us about the bad and

what he is and 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. [laughter] >> yeah. >> tell us a little bit about him and what mainly attracted you to tell his story? >> pat roberts basically came from a very hard background, very fundamentalist mormon family. he was kicked out of his house when he was 18 for admitting to premarital sex and then he decided he wanted to be an astronaut and he changed his whole life and became james bond and he majored in geology and physics and astronomy and he learned how to fly airplanes and scuba dive and spoke five languages. then he got into nasa's johnson space center. at the co-op's center for college kids but it's a feeder to the astronaut training program so he was achieving his dream. he was a standout there.

is a big star. he became the social leader of the co-ops and then he fell in love with a young intern and we have all done something stupid out of love. what he did was he stole a 600-pound safe full of moon rocks from his professor's office and as i said spread them on a bed, had sex with his girlfriend and try to sell them over the internet to a belgium gem dealer. >> whose name is? >> his name was axil ammerman. you could not have invented this guy. he has never been out of antwerp in his life. he collects rocks and trades them every monday night in this huge center where all the guys in antwerp trade rocks. his hobby is popinjay which i had never heard of which is a sport where there is a wooden bird on a 100-foot pole and all these men stand around and shoot it with crossbows. he is this guy and he sees sees this as on the internet.

i have gotten in rocks for sale and he has this big believer in right and wrong so he immediately called the fbi. he e-mailed the fbi in tampa and it became this big sting operation. thad roberts, i always give it away but you know he got arrested, right? [laughter] >> don't cross that line. you obviously have come off of enormous success with not only the book is also the fact they have been converted to movies which helps in terms of that in know to write a. >> they always change the titles of my movies and it's always annoying so sex on on a man is the first one i think they have to keep. >> you are locked in on that and you certainly said you were working on this at the time the social network was being felt so there was no overlap at that point i have always thought the way that actors and actresses are only as good as the roles they choose, writers are only as good as the stories that they fix so what was it? notwithstanding of all of the stories you could have told, what was it that attracted you

to this particular topic? >> for me the stories come to me. i don't look for them any more. ever since bringing down the house i get 20 or 30 e-mails or phonecalls a week. every college kid who does something crazy will calm me and i've always wanted to write about nasa. i think it's amazing but when you think of nasa you think of the 60s. you think of tom hanks in the little silver capsule and this let me get inside nasa today so thad roberts out of the blue contacted me. he had just gotten out of prison and he was on probation. it was weird because i had never met someone who had spent a decade in prison before so i arranged to meet them in a crowded hotel lobby. [laughter] he was the nicest most charismatic, good-looking like smart guy who did something stupid. >> the nicest fella you had ever met. >> he really wasn't i do was amazed no one had written about the story. they had been one article in the "l.a. times" but i had not seen

anything about this and i couldn't believe it. the first thing i did was i filed a freedom of information act with the fbi to get the fbi file which is thousands of pages. i even got when the fbi agents took him down they were wearing wires and i got the transcripts of everything that was set on the wires in the first thing thad said when we walked in the restaurant, if you are wearing a wire i am screwed. beth on tape. so yeah it was while. it was a year-long interviewing everybody i could. >> so there is one section in the book which i think is great where there is the correspondence between thad who is going by the name for a over 10. >> it's a play on for lord orbison. >> you are reprinting their e-mails and those are in fact -- >> ammerman sent me those actually. ammerman was very excited i was writing this book. nasa gave him as a gift for solving the moon rocks caper

they named in asteroid after him so there's an ammerman astroid floating around the sun somewhere so everything in the book is you know brief printed direct weight and a lot of the dialogue is actually straight from the transcript and everything. i do get attacked a lot in the press for my style which is a very kind of dramatic cinematic way of telling a nonfiction story but the reality is that everything in here is from the file's. >> you brought that up and so that's something i wanted to visit with you about a little bit. certainly that came out a lot in bringing down the house so i wondered if you could talk about that technique that you employ as a writer? >> my controversial technique. >> how you employ that and i have to say in "the new york times" review that came out yesterday, she hated you. [laughter] but i think that is part of it. that was the hangover from that so tell me why you do it that

way? >> it's been this way my entire career. i'm a very cinematic thinker and this is the type of stuff i like to read. it's a form of new journalism but i get all the information and interview just about everybody, get thousands of pages of court documents and the fbi stuff and i sit down and tell the story in a very visual way. they're going to be journalists who do not like it. certainly jan and, but i don't necessarily right for janet matalin. i write for me and the people who like this kind of book and the reality is it's a true story and as true as any other thing on the nonfiction list. you see a biography of cleopatra. nobody knows anything about cleopatra, and he sayeth leibowitz abraham lincoln and you see you know, obama's biography has invented characters. it's a process. you have to take the facts and then write it in a certain way. i choose to ride it in a very

cinematic way so for instance i will interview thad roberts and i will interview the other kid who was there, this guy gordon who is was later in the book. i know there was a conversation that took place 10 years ago between these people and i know it was said but i don't know the exact words so one journalism talks about moon rocks but to me that as of warring and weak way of telling that seemed. i know they talked about moon rocks and i know what they did with the moon rocks so i described what they did with the moon rocks. there were some journalists who loved it and some who don't. it will be a controversy forever in terms of certain journalists will never like it. with a social network, mark zuckerberg came out and said it's not true, it's not chair and he called me the jackie collins of silicon valley, which i loved actually. it was great. but he never pointed out anything that wasn't true. he never said this is in trim this is untrue.

then he said he didn't read the book so i don't know where you go with that. i think the reality is it is a very true story. he spread them on the bed and he had sex on the moon. janet madeleine had a problem with f-16 saying he just put them under the mattress but that is actually not true. he did this on purpose so i used the facts but i tell it in my style and you know some people like it and some people don't. >> you can watch this and other programs on line at booktv.org. we would like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twitter.com/booktv. >> seoul, here's my question. karmic topless is written in the breezy popular style and it has sort of a breezy optimism to it. you write at one point and i'm quoting here, the innovative

capitalist culture will allow us to make a houdini style escape from climate changes and most devastating impact. what makes you so sure of that? >> my mother always told me to avoid wishful thinking, and i always try to be provocative to see if folks are awake. i take climate change very seriously now that my two minutes is up. [laughter] i love good jokes. folks i take climate change very seriously and my optimism is really, the core of my optimism, and i don't want you to walk away thinking i am a naïve optimist, is that we anticipate a challenge, our minds in a group of 7 million people, perhaps 9 billion people, if enough of us are scared and aware of the challenge of climate change poses, the beginnings of