if you have various objects in space, what does space look like?

How does the universe

evolve? I mean, cosmology has turned into a science since the time of Einstein. I mean,
before that people had ideas about the universe and you'll often see people refer back to
the same notions that occurred earlier. But really, it's now a scientific theory. So it's true
there were tremendous breakthroughs in the last century. But if you know what the
universe is made of, that's going to tell you how, to some extent how it evolves. And if
you know how it evolves that gives you constraints on what it's made of. So it's not like
there's one field of physics and you can do it in complete isolation from another one. I
mean, part of what makes the field rich and enjoyable for me is that you can ask
questions not just about elementary particles, but also about cosmology. And when you
begin to think about ideas about the whole global nature of space time, you can't help
but think about cosmology as well.

You're now doing, you're already writing a book called Warped Passages: Unraveling
the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions. I love three words there. One,
unraveling the mysteries and secondly, hidden dimensions. What are you trying to find
out? What is it you want to tell us that we're going to be amazed by? if it prove right.

We're really trying to understand, it sounds very vague. But what is the fundamental
nature of matter? And forces? What are the fundamental forces? And why are they
related in the way they are? So we're trying to understand more about gravity, for
example why is gravity so much weaker than all the other elementary forces we know
about that It's to say the three other elementary forces we know about,
electromagnetism, the weak, and the strong nuclear forces. Gravity is far weaker. I
mean, if you think about it, you can pick up a paperclip with a tiny magnet competing
against the entire earth. And the fact that you can jump up and down I mean, gravity is
not a strong force, although it dominates things. It's only because there's big massive
objects

Is it only is not a strong force where we are in might be a strong force somewhere else?

Yeah. So so there's a question of how it manifests itself. And if there's a big energetic
object, it seems strong, but if you took two elementary particles and compare the force of
electromagnetism and the force of gravity. I mean gravity is negligible. You don't even
have to consider it, you throw it away. But why is that? Why is gravity so much weaker?
And it's for particle physicist, it's even more mysterious than just why is it so much
weaker? If you naively just sat down and calculated how you expect the forces to be
related? You would think that those forces should be about the same strength. So
there's a big question that particle physicists have is why is gravity so much weaker than
the other forces? And so that's one question we have. But we have other questions too.
What is the fundamental nature of gravity? Ultimately, we do want to know, what's a
quantum theory of gravity that combines it with quantum mechanics? We want to
understand what the universe is made of? What is the dark matter? What is the dark
energy that's not carried by matter? So there's some pretty big questions, they are
driving us.

Okay. This multiple dimensions idea, I think even Einstein said there were four
dimensions. And then string theories came along and said there are 10 dimensions.

Yeah, String theory seem to think that there are at least 10 dimensions
And how many do you think there are?

I like to leave it an open question. I like to say, what have we measured? What do we
know? And could there be other dimensions out there? And there certainly could be
other dimensions out there. It might be 10 or 11 space-time dimensions as string
theorists tell us now. So why is it the physicists today are really thinking about extra
dimensions? Well, one of the reasons is that we think it might actually have something to
do with our universe. I mean, that's I think, for me the most important reason, but
another reason is, in fact, string theory. And it's introduced the idea that maybe
dimensions really are there because that's the only way the theory makes sense. But
string theory has also introduced something else in the 1990's, physicist Joe Polchinsky
realized that there were these other objects in the context of string theory called branes
because that word is sort of related to membrane and the idea is that there could be
even if you have higher dimensions, even if you have a fifth spatial dimension, or fourth
spatial dimension out there, there could be objects in the universe called branes that
don't spread throughout the entire universe. And maybe stuff is stuck on those lower
dimensional surfaces, and that's one idea that we've got very excited about.