Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, from Plato to String Theory (by way of Alicei n Wonderland, Einstein, and The Twilight Zone)
Lawrence M. Krauss
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0143038028
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
An exploration of mankind's fascination with worlds beyond our own-by the bestselling author of The Physics of Star Trek
Lawrence Krauss -an international leader in physics and cosmology-examines our long and ardent romance with parallel universes, veiled dimensions, and regions of being that may extend tantalizingly beyond the limits of our perception. Krauss examines popular culture's current embrace (and frequent misunderstanding) of such topics as black holes, life in other dimensions, strings, and some of the more extraordinary new theories that propose the existence of vast extra dimensions alongside our own. BACKCOVER: "An astonishing and brilliantly written work of popular science."
-Science a GoGo
"A brilliant, thrilling book . . . You'll have so much fun reading that you'll hardly notice you're getting a primer on contemporary physics and cosmology."
-Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
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of our presently observable universe was as small or smaller than the present size of any compactified extra dimen- sion, how could the presence of significant other dimensions have affected both the origin and evolution of our universe? And, how might our brane evolve dynamically within the bulk space today, or, equivalently, how might the changing nature of gravity on small or large scales in extra- A T H E O R Y O F N O T H I N G ? 227 dimensional Braneworld scenarios have an impact
know what motivated our ancestral carver, but whatever its purpose the figure reflects an artistic imagining of the possibilities inherent either in this world or in one be- yond it. In the three hundred centuries that have passed since this figure was created, human civilization, and human imagination, have evolved consid- erably. But there remains a fundamental connection between our modern efforts and these first, tentative steps: When we imagine the world beyond our experience, we are
underlying four-dimensional space-time continuum, and just as the mathematical form of electromagnetism provided the key that allowed the physicists men- tioned above to solve the mysteries surrounding the strong and weak in- teractions, so, too, did electromagnetism play a central role in the first serious scientific proposal that other dimensions, beyond the four we ex- perience, might actually exist. This proposal, like grand unification some sixty years later, was moti- vated by a
particles was becoming even more crowded. Theorists, not to be outdone, pointed out that in fact one of their clan had earlier “predicted” such a particle. The soon to be famous (and infa- mous) U.S. physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleague Robert Serber explained that in a little-known Japanese journal, in 1935, the physicist Hideki Yukawa had proposed, by analogy to the force of electromagnetism—which operates by the exchange of electromagnetic ra- diation (which quantum
argument for this is based on the fact that if one takes one of the string theories that appears to suggest this hidden extra di- mension, then as the string interaction strength is varied, the quantities that would normally be the coordinates describing the motion of the strings and branes are not simple numbers but are instead described by mathematical objects called matrices. A matrix is like a table of numbers, arrayed in rows and columns. Here are two examples: 1 5 7 2 4 5 3 4
