Lawrence Krauss - Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions

Lawrence Krauss (Arizona State University)

September 21st, 2011.

Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions

Throughout recorded history, humans have longed for a world in which there is more out there than meets the eye. Everything from Hidden universes and alternate realities to vastly different speculations about heaven, hell, and an afterlife have fascinated humankind for millenia, and more recently have captured the public's imagination in such TV shows as The Twilight Zone and Star Trek , in innumerable science fiction books and movies, and art from Picasso to Dali.


Physicists are now hotly debating the possible existence of any underlying mathematical beauty associated with a host of new dimensions that may or may not exist in nature. Further, it has now been proposed that the extra dimensions of string theory may not even be microscopically small. Instead, they could be large enough to house entire other universes with potentially different laws of physics, and perhaps even objects that, like the eight dimensional beings in a Buckaroo Banzai story, might leak into our own dimensions. Whenever scientists speculate about such hidden realities as extra dimensions we have to ask ourselves whether their speculations are more likely to reflect the world as it is, or as our minds are programmed to want it to be. Does the longstanding human love affair with extra dimensions reflect something fundamental about the way we think, rather than about the world in which we live?

These are the questions I shall discuss in my talk, which will in one sense provide a whirlwind tour of the scientific discoveries of the 20th century, but will do so within the context of art and culture over the past 400 years.

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Professor Lawrence Krauss is an internationally known theoretical physicist with wide research interests. including elementary particle physics and cosmology, general relativity and neutrino astrophysics. In addition to his academic research, he is also among the leading public intellectuals in the US. Krauss is one of the few prominent scientists today to have actively crossed the chasm between science and popular culture. He has received a series of prizes, both for his academic research and for his work public engagement to promote public understanding of science and critical thinking in an era of anti- and quasi-scientific nonsense in mass media and political life.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• lawrence
• krauss
• extra
• dimensions
• hiding
• in
• the
• mirror
• string
• theory
• science

[bersaba]

Great talk, but what was with the first QnA mathematician part?

[iasedu]

@bersaba Mathematicians and physicists never get along, that's just a law of nature.

[helleland]

damn it, had i known he would speak in oslo i would have been there for sure :(

[iasedu]

@helleland You don't say.. He actually had three lectures in Oslo that day and the day after. I don't live in Oslo, but 7 hours on a train would be worth it.

[SkallagrimNeinnskegg]

This would be slightly more awesome if the slides were synchronized with the audio.

[iasedu]

@SkallagrimNeinnskegg I wish there was something I could do about it, the website it came from had it already synchronized like this. If I tried to jump ahead on the slides, it would immediately jump back..

[Danthaman1971]

@iasedu

I just opened a second window with the same video, muted the sound and skipped the video so the slides would match the audio of the other window ;)

[x3llence]

the slides are not sychronized :(

[NickMinaj69]

So glad I found your channel iasedu... love all your science videos!

[masterobiwonkenobi]

1:22:30 lol