Catching Up: Lisa Randall, Parents, Toronto and New York

Last Wednesday I dropped my parents and brother off at the airport, after having them here for a few weeks, including a fun trip to Virginia with my in-laws over Thanksgiving. My how things have backed up over this period! One of the many bloggable things that occurred during my family's visit was Lisa Randall's appearance on campus to deliver one of our celebrated University Lectures. As a University Lecturer, Lisa follows in an illustrious tradition, including such speakers as Steven Pinker, Salman Rushdie, Richard Leakey, Rem Koolhaas, David McCullough, Paul Krugman, Tobias Wolff and Maya Lin. I love this series and it is particularly fun when a friend turns out to be the speaker. Lisa's talk was based on her book - Warped Passages - and was a terrific popular-level description of the idea of extra dimensions and their applications in modern particle physics. This is not an easy subject to make accessible at a general level; I found it hard enough recently doing it for a scientifically trained, but non-physicist audience, never mind a general educated one. But Lisa did a wonderful job, focusing on warped extra dimensions (as one might expect) and getting across the main motivations, ideas and consequences. While string theory was given its proper recognition for providing motivations for the Randall-Sundrum constructions, Lisa didn't focus on that, and instead presented the idea mainly as a phenomenological construction. I thought this worked very well and allowed the audience to focus on the more immediate applications and testable aspects of the models without throwing up the many other questions that go along with string theory. Earlier that afternoon we had Lisa over to the department for a discussion on extra dimensions, which ended up as a long and detailed chat with my colleagues Kaustubh Agashe, Cristian Armendariz-Picon and me. This was great, and I certainly learned a lot about the most recent work on this topic. Part of my work is in this area, but there are so many interesting avenues being explored that it is hard to keep up with the literature and it is always useful to hear what's going on from someone involved in some of the aspects one is not working on. After her talk there was time for Lisa and I to grab a couple of glasses of wine at Ohm Lounge. I have known Lisa for quite a long time, since I was a postdoc at MIT back when she was a faculty member there, but this is the first time we've managed to get together in Syracuse and it was great fun to have her here. After a busy semester, Thursday was my last day of classes, and on Saturday I went to Toronto to spend a long weekend there, culminating in a seminar at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) on Monday. I spoke on modified gravity and had an interesting day discussing physics, and an entertaining dinner discussing other topics entirely, with Neal Dalal, Latham Boyle, Jonathan Sievers, Mike Nolta, Lev Kofman, Dick Bond, and others (told you I'd give you a shout-out Neal). I was supposed to leave this evening to spend tonight in New York and get up refreshed to give a talk at the 8th Northeast String Cosmology Meeting, organized by the Institute for Strings, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University, and held at the The New York Academy of Sciences in their new home at 7 World Trade Center. However, since my flight was horribly delayed I'm getting a very early one tomorrow instead - cross your fingers for me please! Also speaking at this event are Nathan Seiberg, Justin Khoury and Raphael Bousso, so I definitely don't want to miss any of their talks, never mind making it in time for my own. Maybe I'll see some New York CV readers there, since the event is free to non-members as part of some special promotion, as long as you sign up (full information here). Anyway, I'll report on this event when I return - better try to get to sleep early so that I can get up at 4am!