The Beauty of Branes [Cosmology & Lisa Randall]

Scientific American ^ | October 2005 issue | Marguerite Holloway

[PatrickHenry]

I still think $210 was the price of the lunch she attended (probably $110, for two) plus an extra $100 tossed in as a token contribution.

[longshadow]

I still think $210 was the price of the lunch she attended (probably $110, for two) plus an extra $100 tossed in as a token contribution.

I've got it!

The $210 figure is probably the value of a subscription to some technical journal, and she made a friendly bet with some left wing colleague: if she won the bet, the colleague paid for her subscription to whatever the journal is that cost $210/year. If she lost the bet, the left wing colleague gets to name what she has to spend $210 on.

She loses the bet (whatever it was), and her colleague says: "I want you to send the $210 (equivalent to the subscription cost of the magazine he'd would have had to pay for had he lost the bet) to the Kerry campaign."

Yeah, that's the ticket....

[PatrickHenry]

Time to recalculate. This website says her contribution was $200: PRESIDENTIAL RACES Donor Lookup.

[PatrickHenry]

Great news! When she was at Princeton, she gave to a Republican congressman. Donor Lookup: Find Individual and Soft Money Contributors. Select "all states" and for the time period, select the year 2000. Ah ... she gave to another Republican in 1994.

[longshadow]

Ah ... she gave to another Republican in 1994.

Completely consistent with my "She lost a bet and had to donate to Kerry" theory.

[Quark2005]

Thanks for the physics ping!

Strings, supersymmetry, branes - not easy stuff to wrap one's mind around. Not very many people in the world truly understand this stuff (I'm certainly not one of them).

[RightWingAtheist]

I teach English to international graduate students, and one of them is a Korean who while a Master's student in his homeland, was one of the authors of a paper on string and brane theory which was published in the Journal of High Energy Physics. He tells me now that he's lost interest in the subject, and is now seeking to apply condesed matter physics to problems in astrobiology.

[RightWingAtheist]

Given that we have now established the Lisa Randall-Kathy Martin rule (evolutionists are more beautiful than creationists) and the Malkin/Coulter-Thomas/Ivins rule (conservative women are more beautiful that liberal women), it seems to be only logical to assume that the most beautiful woman imaginable would be a conservative-to-libertarian evolutionary theorist.

Gentlemen and cads, I give you...Leda Cosmides:

[PatrickHenry]

Very nice, but I've decided to preserve my essence and wait for Lisa.

[Quark2005]

He tells me now that he's lost interest in the subject, and is now seeking to apply condesed matter physics to problems in astrobiology.

Interesting. Funny enough, I know a lot of other physics grad students who (very enthusiastically) entered work in this specific subfield of physics only to find out it wasn't what they expected. Some of the more sensationalistic fields of physics & cosmology actually are extremely dry & sterile in practice.

I do work in particle physics, but having actually looked into what string theory/brane theory is really about, I really have no interest in pursuing it (though it is fun to read the press from this field).

It's always good to remain skeptical about press reports of science theories. For example, I recently attended a short seminar on black holes; apparently the "black hole" allegedly produced at the RHIC accelerator in the popular press wasn't really a black hole at all, but an abstract mathematical analog of one (this was just the easiest way to relate it the press, I guess).

[Doc Savage]

String bikini!

[Doc Savage]

I assume you already vetted her as pro-Darwinian or you never would have posted this. Nice to see you branching out in a variety of mammary, I mean mammalian species.

[Doc Savage]

And your photo disproves molecular irreducible complexity how????? Oh yes, you're an evo zealot and you must be in possession of the truth! Bbbwwwaaahhhhhaaaaaa!

[grey_whiskers]

Given that we have now established the Lisa Randall-Kathy Martin rule

Sorry for the late late late post, but I found my first Lisa Randall thread and have been perusing the rest of them, looking for more photos of her :-)

Can you post or send a pic of Kathy Martin?

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

Lisa Randall:

Tilda Swinton:

I dunno, I kinda see a resemblance.

[MHGinTN]

Hehe, every one of these brilliant freepers looked for the complex answer to the $210 ... count it down, 2 ... 1 ... 0 ! She contributed under duress, obviously.

[grey_whiskers]

2...1...0

I thought it was the chances of any one of us getting a date with her. Monotonically decreasing to the null set.

BTW, why did you take so long to reply? ;-)

Cheers!

[MHGinTN]

On a string theory thread sunkenciv posted a visual found at Randall’s Harvard storage site. This lead to looking through several of SC’s links and this one popped up. Did your read her recent book?

[grey_whiskers]

Oh, yes. 210 might be her IQ.

Cheers!

[MHGinTN]

I don’t get the sense that she is pretentious. Whatever her IQ, she would not flaunt it ... based upon listening to her for a few hours now being interviewed on all sorts of forums.