- Randall, Lisa.
Warped Passages.
New York: Ecco, 2005.
ISBN 0-06-053108-8.
-
The author is one of most prominent theoretical physicists
working today, known primarily for her work on multi-dimensional
“braneworld” models for particle physics and
gravitation. With Raman Sundrum, she created the Randall-Sundrum
models, the papers describing which are among the most highly
cited in contemporary physics. In this book, aimed at a popular
audience, she explores the revolution in theoretical
physics which extra dimensional models have sparked since 1999,
finally uniting string theorists, model builders, and
experimenters in the expectation of finding signatures
of new physics when the
Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) comes on stream
at CERN in 2007.
The excitement among physicists is palpable: there is now reason
to believe that the unification of all the forces of physics,
including gravity, may not lie forever out of reach at the Planck
energy, but somewhere in the TeV range—which will be accessible
at the LHC. This book attempts to communicate that excitement
to the intelligent layman and, sadly, falls somewhat short of the
mark. The problem, in a nutshell, is that while the author is
a formidable physicist, she is not, at least at this point
in her career, a particularly talented populariser of science. In
this book she has undertaken an extremely ambitious task, since
laying the groundwork for braneworld models requires
recapitulating most of twentieth century physics, including
special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, particle
physics and the standard model, and the rudiments of string
theory. All of this results in a 500 page volume where we
don't really get to the new stuff until about page 300. Now, this
problem is generic to physics popularisations, but many others
have handled it much better; Randall seems compelled to invent
an off-the-wall analogy for every single technical item
she describes, even when the description itself would be crystal
clear to a reader encountering the material for the
first time. You almost start to cringe—after every paragraph
or two about actual physics, you know there's one coming about
water sprinklers, ducks on a pond, bureaucrats shuffling paper,
artists mixing paint, drivers and speed traps, and a host of
others. There are also far too few illustrations in the
chapters describing relativity and quantum mechanics; Isaac
Asimov used to consider it a matter of pride to explain things
in words rather than using a diagram, but Randall is (as yet)
neither the wordsmith nor the explainer that Asimov was, but then
who is?
There is a lot to like here, and I know of no other
popular source which so clearly explains what may be discovered
when the LHC fires up next year. Readers familiar with
modern physics might check this book out of the library or
borrow a copy from a friend and start reading at chapter 15, or
maybe chapter 12 if you aren't up on the hierarchy problem in the
standard model. This is a book which could have greatly
benefited from a co-author with experience in science
popularisation: Randall's technical writing (for example,
her chapter in the
Wheeler 90th birthday
festschrift) is a model of
clarity and concision; perhaps with more experience
she'll get a better handle on communicating to a
general audience.
February 2006 