CHAOS AND ORDER
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Excerpts from Krista Tippett’s podcast On Being Dark Matter, Dinosaurs and Extra Dimensions
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CHAOS AND ORDER
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Construction of a bipolar lightbox
Krista Tippett, host Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall started out seeking answers to questions in Standard Model physics and ventured into pondering extra-dimensional worlds. Now she’s moved into illuminating what she calls “the astounding interconnectedness” between fields which have previously operated more autonomously—astronomy, biology, paleontology. She’s pursuing a theory that dark matter might have created the cosmic event that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and hence, humanity’s rise as a species. We explore what she’s discovering, as well as the human questions and takeaways her work throws into relief.
Ms. Randall Well, I think part of what I’m referring to is simply the fact that we really don’t know how to explain why certain particles are essential to the world we live in. We know, for example, that nuclei have what we call up and down quarks inside them. But there are heavier versions. What role do they play? We know there are electrons, but there are heavier versions of the electron known as the muon and the tau. So there’s particles beyond what seem essential to nature or us or life, and we don’t really understand why they’re there. There doesn’t necessarily have to be a reason, but we’d like to see, is it somehow essential to getting us to this point in the world? So that’s part of what I’m referring to there. Tippett So richness is just that variety of particles and qualities that’s known and unknown. Randall I mean there is, of course, also the richness of how the pieces fit together, which is the wonderful stuff that we observe
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Ms. Tippett Here’s something you wrote “Our world is rich—so rich that two of the most important questions particle physicists ask are Why this richness? How is all the matter that I see related?” And I just wanted to ask you to explain what you’re describing there. What does “richness” mean in the context of what you do— in that sentence?
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+ in the world. And we can see how that fits together and then how that came about and try to understand that with science, over time. So it’s kind of twofold. It’s sort of the richness at the fundamental level, but it’s also the richness of the complexity that derives from that, those simple ingredients. But I think, also—in terms of physics, I think the last century has just seen amazing developments. Particle physics really only developed—nuclear physics—all the physics I worked on is a product of, basically, the last century.
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Tippett It just occurred to me—I’m kind of embarrassed to ask this question, because I feel like I should understand it. But I feel like the word—the language of cosmology and physics gets interchanged, at least in non-science circles. I mean how do you distinguish between those things?
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IT’S ALSO THE RICHNESS OF THE COMPLEXITY THAT DERIVES FROM THAT, THOSE SIMPLE INGREDIENTS. Randall So the other thing that gets confused is astronomy, so let me try to distinguish all of them. So physics I think of as the fundamental laws of nature. So for me, physics is elementary particle physics, but there’s all sorts of physics, which are sort of the rules by which things work. Cosmology is a specific science. It has to do with how the universe itself evolved. It has to do with the Big Bang theory, the theory of cosmological inflation, all of which I talk about in my latest book. But it has to do with just how things evolved to where they are today. Astronomy is more, in a sense, looking at stars and looking at the actual objects, how they develop, putting together. So what I like to think is, physicists are looking for sort of fundamental ingredients, astronomers are putting them together in a particular way to describe what we see today, and cosmology tells you how we got to this point. And of
course, they all intertwine. They’re not completely disconnected. But someone will usually identify as an astronomer or a cosmologist or a physicist. TIPPET Yeah, so—well, let’s just leap in. Let’s just go to dark matter. And this book you’ve written this year also has this wonderful title Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs. Randall Thank you. Tippett And let’s do some definition of terms, up front. I mean dark matter is, we now believe, perhaps 85 percent of the matter in the universe. Just start there. How would you talk about…
Tippett I mean let’s clarify what ordinary matter—when we usually say “matter”—non-dark matter is… Randall So it’s the stuff that’s all around us. It’s all matter. It’s all part of what we’re made of. It’s part of Earth. It’s people. It’s
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Randall So people get very disturbed about the idea of dark matter. They say, “How could there be all this matter that we don’t see?” But there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t see. If the history of physics has taught us anything, it’s—or biology or any other field of science—it’s how much we don’t see. And dark matter, I would have—if it was up to me, I probably would have called it transparent matter. It’s matter that doesn’t interact with light. Dark stuff, as you know, absorbs light, so you see it. But dark matter, it’s matter. It interacts with gravity like the matter we know. It clumps. It’s around here, in our galaxy. But it doesn’t interact with light, so we literally don’t see it. We see its gravitational effects, but we haven’t seen other effects. We know it’s there because of the many gravitational influences of large amounts of dark matter, but an individual dark matter particle has so far eluded detection.
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Randall Yep, right now. But we don’t see them, and they don’t interact with us. We don’t feel them. We don’t smell them. They don’t interact with our senses. People are trying to devise very clever ways to look for very subtle, small effects, but so far as we know, the dark matter is not interacting with us a whole lot. It’s interacting via gravity, but gravity is actually a very weak force, at a fundamental level. That’s why you need large amounts of dark matter to observe its effects. Tippett And you say that while dark matter is mysterious to us, it’s not necessarily such a mysterious thing. I think what you’re saying, it’s not necessarily such a mysterious thing that it exists. Randall Well, I don’t think so. I think it’s rather egocentric to think all matter should be just like the matter that we’re made up of and that looks just like our matter. I find it in some sense remarkable that the matter we know about is as significant a fraction as it seems to be. About five percent of the energy in the universe is ordinary matter, whereas 25 percent is dark matter. I find that remarkable. I mean why isn’t it a tiny, tiny fraction? And the fact that we don’t see it—I mean why should everything interact with 12
Tippett I would also like to talk abo with and thought about extra-dimens the things you say is that, again, kin that imagining other dimensions is n ite sci-fi dramas—which I love, where somewhere else, with other endings that they would just be very differen your understanding?
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out the way you’ve worked sional worlds, which—one of nd of clarifying for laymen, not probably like our favore my lifetime is happening s and other pathways. It’s nt, different realities. Is that
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LIKE A FAC HAS BOTH UNDERLYIN
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CE, THE UNIVERSE H BEAUTY AND AN NG ORDER. ON BEING 25
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light? The fact that we interact with light—it’s the kind of mistake people make all the time. We still have to get it knocked into our heads every time, that things are not just the way we see them in our daily lives.
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Randall Well, I think that’s certainly what I imagine is—you could have—I mean the kind of things that I talked about in extra dimensions, where particles and forces we know about are stuck on an object called a brane, which is like a membrane-like surface in a higher-dimensional space—the particles and forces that are stuck here could be different than particles and forces that’s other places. And it’s not entirely different from what I’m saying about dark matter, just to tie together, because what I’m saying there is that there could be different forces. There could be a different kind of electromagnetism, could be a different type of charged particles. I mean the fact is that if there are other worlds, even if they’re in the same place, there could be other universes, in some sense, right here with different particles, different matter, different interactions, just like there can be different forces and particles in other places, along an extra dimension. Tippett I loved in your—what was the book that had “warped” in the title? Randall Warped Passages. Tippett Warped Passages, yeah. There’s a quote at the very front of the introduction from the Beatles song “Got to be good looking, ’cause he’s so hard to see.” [laughs] Randall [laughs] Getting permission for all those quotes was a pain, and probably the Beatles one was probably the most painful, but I just love that quote. But I just love that quote. Tippett Yeah, it’s good.
Randall I loved abusing all the song lyrics. It was really fun. Tippett [laughs] Yeah, you had others. One thing that you say that I experience again and again in my conversations, I think especially with physicists, is that physics is more creative and fun than people would possibly guess, on so many levels. I mean there’s actually a joy in it. There’s kind of a whimsy that you bring in with quotes like that that still make sense and, also, this speculative leap that you’re making in order to investigate in a kind of hard-scientific way.
Randall Right. What I like to think of—the most interesting kind of creativity is constrained creativity, where you have some rules. I mean it’s not just true in science, it’s true when you’re making a movie. I have friends who make movies. There’s certain formulas that you have to stick to, at some level, but within that framework, can you make it interesting? Can you see how things fit together in more complex and surprising ways? And that’s where the creativity comes in, trying to figure out—you have these elements, but how can they be connected? Is there some link that we’re missing? And then, once you have that, you have to be creative about figuring out, how will we know if this is true? What are the predictions that you would make that we wouldn’t be making otherwise? And how can we test them? So I definitely think there’s a lot of creativity. I mean there are certain kinds of physics where you’re just working things out, but there’s certain types of physicists who are thinking about new ideas a lot. And that’s what I like to do.
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THERE’S CERTAIN FORMULAS THAT YOU HAVE TO STICK TO... BUT WITHIN THAT FRAMEWORK, CAN YOU MAKE IT INTERESTING? CAN YOU SEE HOW THINGS FIT TOGETHER IN MORE COMPLEX AND SURPRISING WAYS?
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Tippett I was just thinking about a neuropsychologist I interviewed who’s studying creativity and the brain and creativity as distinct from intelligence. And one of the things they measure, one of the measures of creativity is actually humor, because it is, in fact, about making unexpected connections. Randall I think that’s totally true. In fact, I have a movie reviewer friend who had actually talked about Robin Williams in this context and talked about the amazing connections he made. And that was part of his humor, was this incredible wordplay. And I do find that a lot of math-y people I know really enjoy wordplay a lot, too, because it’s also these bizarre connections that you might not have anticipated.
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Tippett Making those unexpected connections, and then I think about leaning into them with joy, leaning into them.
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Randall And I’m certainly guilty of that, too. [laughs] Tippett [laughs] I know. Actually, I think we’re going to get to that in a little while. Randall I get accused of making nerdy jokes a lot. Tippett You write that once or twice in your life, in the course of your life, when you’ve told someone what you do, that you’re a cosmologist—and they’ve had no idea what that is—they thought you meant cosmetologist. [laughs] Randall [laughs] That’s actually happened. Tippett But then you go on to make this wonderful—you investigated the fact that those words both actually come from the Greek word “cosmos,” and then you say, “Like a face, the universe has both beauty and an underlying order.”
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A selection of different spacetime fabric curvatures
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Randall Yeah, thank you. I actually was thrilled by that, that that is why these words are related. And it does have to do with the kind of order and beauty that they’re associated with, both of them. Tippett I wanted to just—I do sense that that search to find that order—just that sense of adventure, also, about finding that underlying order—is in all your work.
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DESPITE ALL EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY, I INSIST THAT THE WORLD SHOULD MAKE SENSE IN SOME WAYS.
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Randall I know. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I insist that the world should make sense in some ways. Tippett [laughs] Yes, but you also say we shouldn’t be obsessed with the theory of everything. Randall Well, that goes back to what I said earlier about fundamental laws. I don’t think so. I mean I think we make advances. Making advances doesn’t mean that we have the fundamental answer. It doesn’t mean we have the ultimate answer. Even if we did have a fundamental theory, it doesn’t mean we would have everything worked out. It doesn’t mean we’d understand life, because we have the fundamental equations. You’d still have a long way to go to understand a lot of the science that follows from those equations. Tippett You point out that there’s kind of a corollary to physics and cosmology being explicable to non-scientists, which is analogous to how we have trouble understanding biological evolution. And Darwin was aware of this, that it’s very hard to talk to people about things that happen in the course of geologic time, that our
brains simply can’t go there. And you talk about how the scales of the cosmos and of physics are, on the one hand, so enormous or so unfathomably small, that they’re so removed from our experience that this is one reason it’s hard for us to—for people to take in a lot of what’s—of science.
Tippett That’s a wonderful way of thinking about the capacity that science and technology create for humanity. Randall Well, I really think so. And I think there’s just important lessons to be learned. I mean I think we very often think that just what’s obvious is correct and forget that what’s obvious has to do with our senses, has to do with how we perceive the world. And it’s not just a lesson for science; I’d say it’s also a lesson for social interactions too. We’re familiar with our social groups, and we forget that other people’s experiences are different. Or if we remember, we just find them unfathomably difficult to understand, as you would say. But they’re not unfathomably difficult, we just have to make a little bit more effort. Tippett So many people who work with mathematics across the years have talked to me about beauty, beauty as a kind of litmus test of whether something is true. And you say somewhere—you
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Randall I think that’s true. The distinction I would make is that it’s not unfathomably hard. It’s hard. So I think it’s OK to be aware of our limitations as human beings, that these are things that make it harder. It doesn’t make it impossible. And that’s the beauty of science, is that we can go beyond these prejudices, if you like, these intuitions that we have built on our ordinary, everyday experience, and understand what’s going on in regimes that we don’t usually deal with. And that’s the beauty of mathematics, that’s the beauty of science, is, it allows us to think about things that seem obviously wrong. They’re not obviously wrong, they’re just not obvious to us.
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know, beauty and elegance. You say that for you, simplicity is a better guide than beauty. And I wonder if you’d just elaborate on that.
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Randall Yeah, well, I have a chapter in Knocking on Heaven’s Door called “Truth and Beauty and Other Fundamental Scientific Misconceptions.” I don’t think that beauty is as much of a guide as we think it is, because, as you know, we all think different things are beautiful. And also, even what an individual thinks is beautiful changes over time. There’s some ways in which Einstein’s theory looks really beautiful, but there’s other ways, if I told you what the equations look like and what the solutions look like, you’d think it was a bloody mess. So I mean you can frame things so that they seem more beautiful than they are or less beautiful than they are. For science to be meaningful, you want to have as few ingredients as possible to make as many predictions as possible with which you can test your ideas. So I think that’s more the sense—I think that’s what people are thinking of. And simplicity, by the way, isn’t always beauty. [laughs] Sometimes complex things are a little more interesting. Tippett But is beauty a factor for you? I mean I experience it to be kind of a motivating force for a lot of people in science. Randall I would say that there’s a sort of fundamental satisfaction that I find when I find connections, when things you thought were separate could be related. Is that a form of beauty? I mean— probably. I mean I could define it that way. [laughs] And there certainly is the sense in which I’ll be sitting in a seminar, and someone will say something that’s technically natural, and I’m like, “Yeah, but it’s ugly.” So clearly, I do care. Tippett I think this also gets at something else you wrote that’s a simple sentence but strikes me as very important, that “We often fail to notice things that we are not expecting.”
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EVEN IF WE DID HAVE A FUNDAMENTAL THEORY, IT DOESN’T MEAN WE WOULD HAVE EVERYTHING WORKED OUT.
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X-ray remains of Tycho Brahe’s supernova (SN 1572), photographed by NASA’s HEAO-2/Einstein Observatory in 1980
Randall Yeah, I think that it’s so hard to believe, but I mean—and I think going out in nature helps you see that a lot. Someone will notice some animal that just went by, and they’re like, “How did you not see it? It was right in front of you.” But you just weren’t looking. And I think that’s just true of so many things in our daily lives. I mean I have an apartment in Manhattan, and when you look up, you see all sorts of interesting architectural details that you don’t see when you’re at eye level. You sometimes just have to look around, or you miss things. And I think the world is full of surprises, and we’re surrounded by them. But we often miss them.
Randall Well, I think it’s not just important for me, but I think it’s important for telling experimenters what to look for. They have very complex experiments. Unless they know to look for something, it’s very likely that they’ll miss it; it’ll get caught up in the background of all the buzz of all of the other stuff that we know is there but doesn’t tell us something new. So you want to really think about the specific things that you’re looking for to make sure you don’t miss them, and that’s one of my roles as a scientist and as a model builder. Tippett So I want to read—and this is kind of a longish passage from the Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs book, just because I think it’s wonderful. And this research is kind of bringing together insights from astronomy and biology and paleontology, in addition to the things you always think about. And you said, “I was awestruck and enchanted not only by our current knowledge of our environment—local, solar, galactic, and universal, but also by how much we ultimately hope to understand, from our random tiny
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Tippett And it’s fascinating to think about applying that, then, to this sphere in which you’re working—in particle physics and thinking about extra dimensions and dark matter. And you’re saying that the same holds true.
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THERE’S CERTAIN FORMULAS THAT YOU HAVE TO STICK TO, BUT WITHIN THAT FRAMEWORK, CAN YOU SEE HOW THINGS FIT TOGETHER IN MORE COMPLEX AND SURPRISING WAYS?
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perch here on Earth. I was also overwhelmed by the many connections among the pieces that ultimately allow us to exist. To be clear, mine is a deeply unreligious viewpoint. I don’t feel the need to assign a purpose or meaning. Yet I can’t help but feel the emotions we tend to call religious, as we come to understand the immensity of the universe, our past, and how it all fits together. It offers anyone some perspective when dealing with the foolishness of everyday life.” And so I want to just kind of drill down into that a little bit and ask—that perspective that you have from the science you do, can you just talk a little bit about what form that takes, how being steeped in these ideas and discoveries and questions shapes the way you move through the world of ordinary matter [laughs] that we’ve also been talking about?
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SIMPLICITY, BY THE WAY, ISN’T ALWAYS BEAUTY. SOMETIMES COMPLEX THINGS ARE A LITTLE MORE INTERESTING. Randall Well, it’s funny, because—I mean I’m a pretty observant person, but I can also have blinders sometimes and just focus on what I’m interested in, and I think it’s important to do that if you want to make progress in what you’re doing. It’s funny, when I was at MIT, one of the staff people who I hardly knew—I guess she maybe did entries—and she came over and said, “I noticed that you seem to be able to”—because there are obviously issues at any university—she was like, “I noticed you manage to be able to ignore all those things and just focus on what you’re doing.” And I was just really surprised. I was like, “Huh,” because I certainly didn’t feel like I was ignoring them; I was pretty aware of them. But there is some sense in which you have to have some perspective and say what’s important; and for some people, those details are important, but I like to think that there’s fundamental truths that we might be learning that are in some sense more important. And those are worth drilling down and really focusing on. So sometimes I’ll laugh—I’ll think about, suppose there
were creatures in other planets, and they read our newspaper, or they watched our TV? I mean what would they be thinking? I’m not saying they would always have negative conclusions, but it’s just fun to think of someone who’s outside all the details, outside of all of this. I mean will they really be as excited about the new iPhone as people seem to be? Tippett [laughs] Right, yeah. Randall Will they really notice a difference? “That looks pretty much the same to me.” [laughs] So that’s not to say that we don’t all get caught up in it, but I think it is sometimes important to think, what are the really big places where we’re making advances?
Tippett So the question I actually wanted to ask you out of this is this question of what it means to be human, how you would start reflecting on that—and the sense of how that’s evolved, as your scientific work and perspective has evolved. I know, it’s huge. Randall [laughs] Yeah, that’s kind of a huge question. I was like, Oh, just one little question to end. Tippett No, you don’t have to give a comprehensive—just how would you start thinking about that? [laughs] Randall I guess I would think about how I interact with the world, what that is at a fundamental level, what my senses can perceive, and then, how I interpret that information, how I try to form a bigger story. I think the influence of time is really important—how that story changes over time. I think that’s one of the really interesting questions. How does the you today connect to the you that
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Tippett You are really—you are a scientist’s scientist, in addition to being a translator for the rest of us. But I also really feel like your work is so interwoven with your being, and there’s a joyfulness, there’s such a lightness to it. It’s not all intellectual.
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you were when you were younger? I think that’s a really important question. When did you become you, in the sense of, when did your thoughts and memories develop to a point where they’re distinct? So I guess I would try to break it down to smaller questions so that I can compare, say, one time to another time, maybe the way I see something to another human being.
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I mean there’s so many fundamental things we don’t know. I mean when I see something blue, am I seeing the same thing that you’re seeing? There’s just so many questions about what it means to be human that I sort of don’t know where to begin, but on the other hand, I would begin at any one of these places, and they probably all could give you some answers.
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Tippett Yeah. The idea of time—I feel like this is one of the most interesting, profound places where science just—and physicists, in particular—just see the world differently than the ordinary experience that most of us have. Randall Oh, I would just say nobody understands time. Tippett That nobody understands time? Randall Yeah. Tippett I remember talking to Paul Davies a long time ago about Einstein, and he talked about the notion of block time, that essentially, somehow, everything is actually happening at the same time, but we can’t perceive that. Randall Yeah—do you believe that? Doesn’t seem to be true. Tippett I don’t know. I mean I think about it sometimes. I try to imagine.
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Paraffin planet, prototype 2013/II, from RPPM No. 1
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Randall It’s awfully deterministic. I don’t know. It seems like to me that there’s a little bit more randomness in the world. Tippett Yeah, so I mean how do you think about—I mean I love those questions you just framed about the me that was then and the me that is now and what time makes possible. I mean how do you think about time as an element of human becoming? Or does that even make sense?
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Randall Well, I mean there’s sort of a practical element of just how things change over time. I think it’s interesting, as people study aging. I mean this is sort of a depressing idea, but when I think about the question of the soul, it’s just interesting, because when you see someone who’s on the verge of death or has Alzheimer’s or is really sick, I mean is that the same person they were before? I mean so where’s the soul? Is that the person that’s going to survive? I mean it just seems like it shows you how difficult these concepts are to really define in any way, which is why I pretty much don’t believe in it. But I do think it forces you to think about what it means to be a human being and what it means to be about a particular human being.
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But there’s time associated with people, and there’s times associated with abstract physical processes. I can talk about extra dimensions of space, but we don’t know how to talk about extra dimensions of time, really, and, certainly, ones that we overlap with. So time seems to be this thing by which we measure progression, but how that got defined in the first place, I think, is a very difficult question. Tippett Is mystery in your vocabulary—the language of mystery?
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Randall Oh sure. Sure. So is solving. [laughs]
WE OFTEN FAIL TO NOTICE THINGS THAT WE ARE NOT EXPECTING.
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(Above) Tycho Brahe’s equitorial armillary sphere (ca. 1580) (Right) Segment of The Entire Visible Universe on August 12, 2003
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IMAGES Waldvogel, Christian. Unknown The Orders of Randomness. Stadt Zurich Kultur, 2014. Ventura, Manuela. Cosmos Libro Experimental. https//issuu.com/ manumagenta/docs/cosmos__issuu_. 2014.
TEXT Tippett, Krista, narrator. Lisa Randall Dark Matter, Dinosaurs, and ON BEING
Extra Dimensions. On Being, 2017, https//onbeing.org/programs/li-
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sa-randall-dark-matter-dinosaurs-and-extra-dimensions-sep2017/.
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