-a painfully dense read

In his best selling book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking quipped that a friend told him each equation in his book “would halve the sales.” Fortunately, Lisa Randall collected hundreds of equations as endnotes, so I could happily ignore all those superscript numbers and only worry about the asterisks which took me to the bottom of the pages.

Wow! Warped Passages is for serious amateurs with an interest in esoteric science. At one time, I read a lot more of this stuff than I do now, so I will admit to being a little rusty. The interview I heard on NPR mentioned string theory, which I find endlessly fascinating, if not entirely understandable. Randall’s fluid prose added to my knowledge there, but I was lost when she started talking about “branes.” She defines these as “A membrane-like object in higher-dimensional space that can carry energy and confine particles and forces” (460). This gives you some idea of what I was up against. Still I slogged on, and I am glad I did.

Branes are an extension of string theory, and the idea is that they hold the key to extra dimensions in space. Maybe all those UFOs have found a way to pass between branes and enter our plane of existence.

I know I will come back to this book in the future, because it makes an excellent reference work. A handy glossary and summaries at the end of each chapter are extremely helpful. Her line drawings were also good for illustrating some of her ideas. Four gold stars!

--Jim, 7/17/08 ( )

Absolutely wonderful book. Lisa manages to describe without maths what is behind current theories in physics and the workings of the fundamental particles of all matter. She actually makes the unfolding mysteries of quarks and leptons fascinating reading, describing the paths that research has taken in the last 50 years or so and what is left to find out. You won't remember much of the details but what you will get is a general understanding of what they are looking for and how they do it. ( )

Most of this book is really about the modern history of physics, but she eventually gets to the incredibly interesting topics that she currently researches. This is excellent popular science. ( )

This is not an easy book to read. What's easy about quantum mechanics? To my own astonishment, however, Lisa Randall took me from basic physics to the esoteric theories of warp geometry, string theory and added dimensions in a way that I could understand and actually remember. She uses examples from our daily lives in an imaginative and fun way to make the readers understand some extraordinarily difficult concepts and take us along the road of discovery and, of course, speculation.

This book has nothing to do with Star Trek or Star Wars but I found it just as fascinating. ( )

Hard to read but quite enlightening with a lot of redundant passages. Style and short stories at the beginning of each chapter rather dull. Nevertheless recommendable for everyone who wants to broaden his horizons (in the truest sense of the word). ( )

A fascinating look at where the world of outré physics is going. Moderately-hard slogging, but probably worth it, although I do find myself with a question or two. I didn't finish it because it had to go back to the library--I'll have to re-borrow it sometime. ( )

The absolute best description of a multi-dimensional universe I've ever read for someone without the necessary background to understand anything more than a rare, rough, abstraction of the mathematics involved. Which, sadly, is me. But less sad for the existence of this book. ( )

Fascinating, but really hard to get through for a non-science person. She does her level best though. ( )

Warped passages is well named: unraveling the mysteries of the universe. Physics is moving out from the Standard Model and Lisa Randall brings us along. What are extra dimensions, anyway? Read and find out.
http://www.wonderquest.com/index.htm ( )

Lisa Randall does an excellent job of making complex ideas understandable to nonspecialists. She explains new ideas about the dimensionality of spacetime and along the way the reader gets to discover the underlying component parts of the universe.

To one interested in God, theology and religion, this book is especially fascinating. Creation is truly extraordinary (and that's what I'd expect from an extraordinary God). ( )

Another big publishing event by a front-line physicist. Approaches to the deficiencies of Standard-Model particle physics -- supersymmetry, strings, branes, ... and, especially, hidden dimensions of space. Large extra dimensions could be invisible to us because photons, not to mention all ordinary matter particles, would be confined to our 3-brane; only gravitons, perhaps, would be free to move throughout the bulk space (thus explaining why the gravitational interaction is so extremely feeble relative to the strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions). 458+ pages.

Spends several hundred pages on an uneven introductory history of physics, a subject covered better in many other books. I found the personal anecdotes and sci-fi interludes hokey and largely ineffective. Randall does better once she is on her home turf of hidden dimensions, but this was a disappointing read. ( )

The concept of additional spatial dimensions is as far from intuitive as any idea can be. Indeed, although Harvard physicist Randall does a very nice job of explaining—often deftly through the use of creative analogies—how our universe may have many unseen dimensions, readers' heads are likely to be swimming by the end of the book. Randall works hard to make her astoundingly complex material understandable, providing a great deal of background for recent advances in string and supersymmetry theory. As coauthor of the two most important scientific papers on this topic, she's ideally suited to popularize the idea. What is absolutely clear is that physicists simply do not yet know if there are extra dimensions a fraction of a millimeter in size, dimensions of infinite size or only the dimensions we see.