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Lisa Randall

Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions Paperback – Illustrated, September 19, 2006

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The universe has many secrets. It may hide additional dimensions of space other than the familier three we recognize. There might even be another universe adjacent to ours, invisible and unattainable . . . for now.

Warped Passages is a brilliantly readable and altogether exhilarating journey that tracks the arc of discovery from early twentieth-century physics to the razor's edge of modern scientific theory. One of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Lisa Randall provides astonishing scientific possibilities that, until recently, were restricted to the realm of science fiction. Unraveling the twisted threads of the most current debates on relativity, quantum mechanics, and gravity, she explores some of the most fundamental questions posed by Nature—taking us into the warped, hidden dimensions underpinning the universe we live in, demystifying the science of the myriad worlds that may exist just beyond our own.

Print length

499 pages
Language

English
Publication date

September 19, 2006
Dimensions

5.31 x 1.15 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0060531096
ISBN-13

978-0060531096
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Lisa Randall, a leading theorist, has made major contributions to both particle physics and cosmology.” -- Brian Greene, bestselling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabrics of the Cosmos

“Randall is one of the most influencial and exciting young theoretical Physicists working in elementary particle physics and cosmology today.” -- Lee Smolin, author of Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

“A great read. . . . I highly recommend it.” -- Ira Flatow, host of National Public Radio’s Science Friday

About the Author

Lisa Randall studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University, where she is Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. Professor Randall was included in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" of 2007 and was among Esquire magazine's "75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century." Professor Randall's two books, Warped Passages (2005) and Knocking on Heaven's Door (2011) were New York Times bestsellers and 100 Notable Books. Her stand-alone e-book, Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space, was published in 2012.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ecco (September 19, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 499 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060531096
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060531096
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 1.15 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #276,800 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #18 in Particle Physics
- #130 in Mathematical Analysis (Books)
- #366 in Cosmology (Books)

Customer Reviews:
380 ratings

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Lisa Randall

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Lisa Randall studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University, where she is Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. Professor Randall was included in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" of 2007 and was among Esquire magazine's "75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century." Professor Randall's two books, Warped Passages (2005) and Knocking on Heaven's Door (2011) were New York Times bestsellers and 100 Notable Books. Her stand-alone e-book, Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space, was published in 2012.

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Donald G. Zeiter

Not Her Best Book

Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2017

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Let me say right off that the author is way smarter than I am and forgets more about physics than I will ever learn in my lifetime. String theory may or may not pan out but she knows an awful lot of the subject and I respect her greatly. I have read Knocking on Heaven's Door and Dark Matter and The Dinosaurs and found them both relatively easy to understand and informative. I don't mean this review of Warped Passages to diminish my respect for her knowledge of physics.

But the subtitle of the book is Unraveling The Mysteries Of The Universe's Hidden Dimensions and while it does a good job of talking about the hidden dimensions it never gets around to saying where these hidden dimensions are and why no one can find them.

Studying String Theory has to be frustrating. Because it seems to be all theory and no evidence. On page 61 there are 4 full paragraphs. Here is how each start (CAPS are mine):
1 - Other branes MIGHT be parallel to ours and MIGHT house parallel worlds.
2. - In a world in which branes are embedded in a higher-dimensional bulk, there COULD be some particles that explore the higher dimensions and others that stay trapped on Nranes.
3 - New forces confined to distant branes MIGHT exist.
4 - IF there is life on another brane, those beings, imprisoned in an entirely different environment, MOST LIKELY experience entirely different forces that are detected by different senses.

AGHHHHHHHHH!!!! It's all possible and speculative. String theory might or could or if. I could say there are parallel universe's that contain higher developed life forms and can direct actions in our world along the lines of the mythic Norse or Roman gods. And as I write that I should know that there really are people that believe in Norse or Roman gods and scoff at anything Lisa Randall or Brian Greene writes.

Eventually Randall gets to explaining the aspects of string theory and if you make it that far you get the feeling that it's all built on a base of sand. I doubt that there is a way to make ST exciting or interesting to those of us below Randall's IQ level like myself. If Einstein had come out with General Relativity with no way to ever test it he never would have been famous. But people can test his theories and space/time has pretty much stood up to scrutiny.

Unless you want to know more about ST and what makes up the different parts of the theory this book is probably not for you. Since it came out in 2005 there has a lot been done, especially with the LHC up and running, so maybe if she updated it today it could be a better read.

47 people found this helpful

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Walter Stanley

Highly and Abstruse, but Fascinating,

Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2018

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The first quarter of the book was mostly a review of physics that I already know, though I did learn that Bohr's model of the atom incorporated an electron with wave properties. I had always thought that Bohr, though his atomic model had quantum levels for the electrons, he still thought of them as particles, and that the wave nature of the electron did not come in until de Broglie's atomic model. I have been teaching this incorrectly for a while now. Much of the last 75% was so abstract that I, at best, I could only understand the gist of it, The subject, however, was nonetheless fascinating. I wish I had the mind capable of understanding mathematics at this level. I suspect that it would be beyond me no matter how hard I tried. At least, I can appreciate it.

11 people found this helpful

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DoubleM

A FUN ROMP THROUGH THINGS NOT READILY APPARENT

Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2018

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It took me a while to read this volume because as I was trying to get from the tenth dimension to the eleventh, there were particles floating around in my Brane and, as I tried to string them together to make sense out of them, I hit Dark Matter and fell into a Black Hole. Now I am awaiting the validation of the Higgs boson (the so-called "god" Particle), which I believe is the only thing that will save me from the mess in which I find myself.

Seriously, I am a novice physics junkie, who understands only a little about physics, but loves adding to my inventory of what physicists suspect. I love the intrigue but find the language a little difficult to rapidly read about one of my favorite subjects; however, Ms. Randall's treatise contains a glossary at the end, which (had I read it in hardback I would have found earlier) allowed me to better understand the nomenclature of this exciting science. This book's composition is excellent and its content is very easy to follow: at the beginning of each chapter, the author relates fairy tales so the reader may pause to regroup; she further uses every day analogies which give the reader virtual images to demonstrate things no one on this planet can actually see. She uses a garden hose to demonstrate the force and gravity of how particles (or other very small, unseen, items) act in a world physicists mathematically know are there, but cannot produce in actuality.

Highly recommended; I will read her other books when Higgs boson acts to save me from this Black hole. Thanks, Ms. Randall.

6 people found this helpful

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John Ferngrove

Warped Sausages

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 16, 2009

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As someone who took an astrophysics degree in the seventies I have tried to keep up to date with developments in the field, at the level of pop-sci books. However as of the late nineties it seemed that Physics was getting bogged down. After a long Golden-Age of prediction and dicovery the Standard Model and the Big-Bang were threatening to unravel. So the last such book I read was Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory which I found unsatisfying in that it just made clear that, if I wanted to really understand what was happening, I was going to have to devote time and energy I just didn't have, to get to grips with some new maths.

So, seven years later I thought I'd give this a try and see if I could get some kind of layman's angle on what was going on these days. The book starts well in reviewing the history of physics. There's a very concise and to the point description of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

There's a description of the Standard Model that I did find useful. I thought I had a fairly good understanding of the Standard Model, but the lady filled in some new areas for me, Electroweak theory and the Higg's mechanism which led me to a more flexible understanding of particle mass than I had had before. It is as part of this that we find that the toughest question for the Standard Model is what is called the Hierarchy Problem, which is about the huge gap between the world the other three forces and SM particles inhabit, all of which can be probed, just about, with our accelerators, and then the world of the Planck distance down at E10-33 m, sixteen orders of magnitude smaller, which is where gravity becomes strong enough to be comparable with the other forces, and which we can never hope to build accelerators big enough to study directly.

We then walk through QED, QCD, symmetry, supersymmetry keeping an eye on how these things might tackle the Hierarchy problem, but that they either fail to solve the problem or yield positive experimental results.

We then get a whirlwind tour of String Theory the Super-Strings, and this is where it all gets really new for me. It would appear particle theorists, trying to extend the Standard Model, and String theorists, working on stuff that can never hope to be proven 'not even wrong', have enjoyed a synergy over the last few years, and as a result various classes of exotic multi-dimensional theories have emerged which just might yield observable consequences, possibly even turning up in the new LHC collider, when it eventually comes online. All of these theories try to tackle the Hierarchy problem by allowing gravity to be the only force that gets out of the 4D space-time 'brane on which we and the other forces and SM particles 'live', thus allowing its effects to be diffused. It would appear that there a quite lot of recipes for higher dimensional models that allow for the dissipation of 16 order of magnitude, and the number is growing year on year. For this reason there is a whole community of physicists anxiously waiting for the LHC to get down to work, and who are hoping, in addition to finding Higgs particles, which the Standard Model predicts, to find completely new and unexpected particles, or energy deficits, that might lend support to one or other of the competing higher dimensional theories.

The book contains a lot of news for someone interested in these things, but it is pretty hard work and not just due to the nature of the material. I know that communicating this stuff to the lay public is a talent in its own right, and I've no doubt as to Randell's sincerity of purpose. However, I found that reading became tougher is I progressed, because I felt myself to be carrying an ever accumulating baggage of questions of elucidation, so that towards the end we were talking so casually in terms of 'branes', curvatures, 'gravitons', 5-D Black Holes and curled-up, or large, or infinite but invisible extra dimensions, that she might as well heve been talking about sausages. Hence my quirky title for this review.

In my opinion, the book is somewhat longer than it needs to be because of frequent repetition of points that are easily grasped. Each chapter is prefixed with a Lewis Caroll like passage intended to provide a metaphor for the material to follow. These become more irritating as the book proceeds, as the metaphors become more strained and eventually plain cryptic.

This book is probably the best of its kind around at the moment, and there's no denying that Randell has tried really hard to explain some mind-bending things, in lay-person terms. But I think there is scope for a presentation of the same material by someone who has a proven track record in popular science writing.

Another point to make is that she has definitely perked my interest in the forthcoming results from the LHC.

22 people found this helpful

Roy Hutchinson

One of the better books in explaining the concepts

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 14, 2017

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Excellent book. Really explains aspects of particle physics, the standard model, relativity and quantum physics well. It would be even better if the book was brought up to date with the Large Hadron Collider, the discovery of the Higgs boson and gravity waves.

One person found this helpful

Mr. Raymond L. Hall

Excellence.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 18, 2015

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Easily the best current book for those wanting an authoritative current account of extra dimensions, branes, and the juxtaposition of perspectives and progress in attempting to advance past the Standard Model. Prof. Lisa Randall answered many questions for me in an entertaining read, that hadn't fully been cleared up by similar publications. Highly recommended.

S. Kass

Exelent book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 25, 2019

Verified Purchase

Exelent book
Read like a novel

Daniboy

Good but repetitive

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 13, 2009

Verified Purchase

This book introduces in a clear and concise manner many difficult and advanced concepts. To do this without mathematics is an impressive feat, which Randall seems to have accomplished. I study physics and have just completed my Bachelor degree so I found extremely tedious to read what I already knew as it was repeated again and again in a long string of pretty much identical analogies. If you don't understand it the first time it's explained, you might understand it the second, third or even sixth time time it's explained in a very similar way to the first.

This element of irritation aside, the book still gave me useful insight into a world of physics I have but scratched the surface of. I think the target reader is the scientifically interested / scientifically aware person who would like to get into the "juicy bits" of physics without going through the long and winding academic road. For physics or mathematics undergraduates, you can easily skip the first hundred or two hundred pages without missing a thing.

One person found this helpful

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