Warped Passages: Unravelling the Universe's Hidden Dimensions (Penguin Press Science) [Paperback]

I am not a scientist. I'm a writer and former actor. But, ever since I was a kid and discovered Scientific American, I've had an abiding interest in science both for the things there are to learn and the recreation that reading science offers. So, I've read a ton of stuff about science.

I have read some books that have knocked me off my feet over the years. But, Warped Passeges knocks their sox off. I admired the book so much that after I read my library copy, I bought it.

The first time I ever heard (outside SF, of course) about dimensions beyond three of space and one of time, was not so long ago when New Scientist did a piece on the idea. The problem was that the article raised too many questions of the wrong kind. What the piece whould have done is deal precisely with the questions that were raised. Those were the simple basic questions. For example, What is a dimension? The answer was not forthcoming in any set of words that made sense.

In Warped Passages, Lisa Randall, not only answered that question but it made sense to me and gave me a good idea of what the teeny, tiny ones are. I could never find anyone to make even the slightest sensible explanation before.

The whole book answers rafts of questions of that nature and a whole lot more as well. I'm grateful to her for that. The book even led to the answer to a question that has bothered me for many years - Why is there only one time dimension?

The answer lies in Randall's field of model making (I didn't even know what model making meant in physics before reading the book) which suffuses her book. For me, it was her historical, beginning, middle, end approach that took me by the hand and led me down a pretty wonderful garden path.

You may not need the most basic questions answered. If so, I suppose you can speed-read those passages. However, I think you will still get a huge amount out of the book.

However, if you are anything like me, you will come out of the other end of the book informed and delighted.

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.

On the covers of many modern physics books, addressed to laymen interested in the latest developments, abstract graphics is shown, trying to convey a sort of mystical flavour of the subject. But mostly used with the intention to stand out and get the attention of readers, who nowadays are overwhelmed by these books, especially in this World Year of Physics 2005, in which Einstein's work is highlighted.

The cover of Lisa Randall's book "Warped Passages: Unravelling the universe's hidden dimensions" is very different. The title and her name are printed in her own handwriting, which gives this book a casual, but dead honest look. As if she has just scribbled down her latest ideas and wants the world to take notice as soon as possible, but in my opinion it marks the style of someone who is brutally honest about her work and wants the reader to really understand what she is talking about.

And you will not be disappointed: her passion for her research is well reflected in this book. I read it almost like a 'who dunnit' thriller so I will not spoil your fun by giving away too much details, but, having read quite a few similar books, this one really stands out in the crowd.

All the familiar characters of modern day physics, like quantum mechanics, relativity theory, particle physics, supersymmetry, string theory and braneworlds come on stage. They are properly introduced to the reader in separate chapters, which each start with a little intermezzo to give you a feel for how the story will go on. It serves both as an appetizer and gives you a moment to reflect before indulging in the next scenes.

This all builds up to the last chapters, where all these characters seem to play a part in a mysterious plot: hiding the evidence for extra dimensions !!
Then you will discover that Lisa Randall has quite a few tricks up her sleeve to push these characters to reveal the truth they so cleverly conceal from us in our everyday four-dimensional world. By introducing several different higher-dimensional models of our universe, she interrogates them one by one. That's hard and arduous work, that's for sure, but you get the exciting impression that they will give in and that answers are laying just around the corner. The author makes a quite convincing story so far and finally asks the reader with the same disarming honesty this question: "Extra dimensions: Are you in or are you out?"

Many questions have yet to be completely answered, but I for one am certainly in...

Don't worry, you won't need a formal background in physics or mathematics to fully appreciate this book. After each chapter the main points are summarized with bullets, as easy reminders without interrupting the natural flow of the story. No formulae are presented in the main text, but in the back however is a math notes section where some subjects are further explained. So if you are a newbie, an amateur physics buff (like me) or even a professional physicist, I am sure the enthusiasm and fun with which the author tells this fascinating story will take you on a rewarding and intellectually challenging adventure !!