Changing Our Understanding of Multiple Dimensions

Description: Exponential warping, Randall says, has large implications.

Transcript:

Well I think the fact that there can be this exponential warping and it has these really dramatic implications is pretty important. It’s important for the reason that I just said, which is that it might explain why mass scales are different. It could be relevant for other places where you’d want different mass scales, such as inflationary cosmology. But we also found something else that was very interesting – that you could actually have an infinite dimension of space; that’s an extra dimension, a fourth dimension of space that you don’t see. And this is really radical in the sense that since basically physicists always thought that if you had extra dimensions, they had to be tiny because we don’t see them. It’s pretty intuitive. If something’s really small, you don’t see it. And so the idea that you had very curled up or finite-sized extra dimensions. And that was basically what people thought was essential – for us not to see them. It turns out that this strong warping that we discovered could also mean that gravity is so concentrated that you don’t see it in an extra dimension of space. So that could have radical implications obviously for our universe.