by Bob Long

I went on a picnic in Parping, Nepal once with a group of local nuns and a few other Westerners. We were sitting on our blanket noshing when a demented conversation got under way. At one point I blithely chirped, “Things exist because they don’t. If they truly did exist, they couldn’t.” A fellow beside me, yawning, replied, “Well, that’s obvious.” I marveled then at the placid assurance with which we accepted being such oddballs, talking above our own heads.

Lisa Randall is an out-there cosmologist who is tenured at Princeton, MIT and Harvard. She looks like a model, and goes to lecture dressed in Miuccia Prada. When she attends conferences, she is famous for heading out to buy couture in her time off. She also does rock climbing, bicycles around Italy, wanders India, writes opera libretti, and likes to quote Eminen and Bjork. Who said academics are a bunch of old fuddy duddies? Or that they have to look like Bea Arthur?

In “Warped Passages: unraveling the mysteries of the universe’s hidden dimensions”, she leads you on an E-Z tour of modern physics, first re-treading the familiar ground of relativity and quantum mechanics, then brushing you up on your supersymmetry and string theory, and finally heading off into her own further abyss of higher dimensional time-space matrices, a domain once thought fruity but now gaining respectability. She makes it all seem eminently reasonable.

To relieve 500 p. of arduous physical theory, there are copious illustrations. One shows a rabbit doing a dance in front of a light projector to make a shadow of a human hand on a screen. There are Feynman diagrams, and pix showing particle arrays as water drops dispersed in a garden hose. I missed a lot, even with all this help, but I did do some good brain aerobics. Chakrasamvara practice didn’t add up either, but it took me out beyond my usual smallness.

There are a lot of interesting factoids within: that the original size of the universe was 10^-32 centimeters (that’s dinky, and it’s also the size of the Planck constant), that only 30 percent of the energy in the universe is carried by matter, the other 70% existing as a latency in the vacuum, and so on. Hey, are she and her pals making all this up? Well, one could just as well ask such a question about the three kayas or the five buddha famlies. Does conceptual mind call forth a world?

You might worry, “But can you take it to the beach?” Heck yeah, you can. Lisa R. is an egalitarian cut-up who wants everyone to get it through humorous metaphors and similes, helping you to grasp the accumulating force patterns of virtual gluons by comparing their actions to the events in the Trojan War, making funny about how it all could have stopped at a mano a mano between Paris and Menelaus (but then she couldn’t have taken her particles on to their end result).

Rolling Stone calls Lisa Randall “one of the 25 most interesting people in the U.S.” It’s undoubtedly true. Stephen Hawking, asked a few years ago to give the Loeb lectures at Harvard, talked mainly about her theories. She’s one of those exasperating three-dimensional beings who have it all, yet somehow remain humble. It is admittedly hard not to hate people who so effortlessly outclass us. Trungpa Rinpoche said the solution to our jealousy is to admire them openly.