Time Warps and Warped Passages

On this morning’s installment of Exploration, Michio Kaku speaks with Dr. Brian Greene on the fabric of space and time. Later, at 5:30, he’ll chat with Dr. Lisa Randall about her book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions.

About the guests:

Brian Greene (born February 9, 1963) is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi–Yau manifolds (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point. He has become known to a wider audience through his books for the general public, The Elegant Universe, Icarus at the Edge of Time, The Fabric of the Cosmos, The Hidden Reality, and related PBS television specials. Greene also appeared on The Big Bang Theory episode “The Herb Garden Germination“, as well as the films Frequency and The Last Mimzy.

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Lisa Randall is currently a professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. However, she stays active in the field because she continues to study both particle physics and cosmology. She stays current through her research into the nature of matter’s most basic elements, and the forces that govern these most basic elements. Randall’s experiences, which qualify her as an authority on the subject of the book, are her original “contributions in a wide variety of physics studies, including cosmological inflation, supersymmetry, grand unified theories, and aspects of string theory“. “As of last autumn, she was the most cited theoretical physicist in the world during the previous five years.” In addition her most recent work involved extra dimensions.

Her background research for the book, on the theories and experiments of extra dimensions and warped geometries, was published in the peer-reviewed Science magazine in 2002.


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