Warped Passages - Lisa Randall [214]
Even those who did listen didn’t necessarily believe us right away. A conversation we had with the string theorist Andy Strominger was very enlightening, even though he now laughs at how he initially didn’t believe a word we said. Fortunately, he hadn’t been too skeptical to listen and talk.
In the physics community, there were a few who understood and believed what we were doing right from the start. We were lucky that Stephen Hawking was among them, and that he did not hesitate to share his enthusiasm with physics audiences. I remember Raman excitedly telling me how Hawking’s prestigious Loeb Lectures at Harvard concentrated heavily on our work.
Several others also worked on some related ideas. But the following fall, several months after our paper was published (and many months after we had begun talking about it), was when the theoretical physics community at large started paying attention. It turned out to be good fortune that David Kutasov, a University of Chicago physicist from Israel, and Misha Shifman, a Russian-born particle theorist from the University of Minnesota, and I had organized a six-month workshop in the fall of 1999 at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. The original goal of this workshop had been to bring together string theorists and model builders, and profit from an incipient convergence of research interests on topics such as supersymmetry and strongly interacting gauge theories. We had started planning the workshop well in advance, before the concept of branes and extra dimensions had created such a stir. Although we had hoped for some positive synergy between string theorists and model builders, we didn’t know at the time we started the organization that we’d be thinking about extra dimensions when the conference actually happened.
But the timing proved to be fortuitous. The workshop provided an excellent opportunity to flesh out ideas about extra dimensions, and for model builders, string theorists, and general relativists to share expertise. Many exciting discussions took place, and warped geometry was one of the chief topics. In the end, both model builders and string theorists took warped five-dimensional geometry seriously. In fact, the distinction between the two fields blurred as people teamed up to work on similar problems on warped geometry and other ideas.
Many physicists later worked on other aspects of warped geometries, establishing connections and exploring subtleties that made localized gravity even more interesting. Although string theorists had originally dismissed RS1 (the warped geometry with two branes) as just a model, once they began to search they found ways to realize the RS1 scenario in string theory. Questions about black holes, time evolution, related geometries, and the connections to ideas from string theory and particle physics have also been fertile areas of research. Localized gravity has now been investigated in various contexts, and new ideas continue to emerge.
After our theory was accepted and no longer thought incorrect, some physicists actually went overboard in a different direction, claiming our theory was nothing new. One string theorist even went so far as to conclude that a string theory calculation of the impact of Kaluza-Klein modes was the “smoking gun” that proved our theory was the same as a version of string theory that string theorists had already been studying. This conformed to the joking adage in science that a new theory goes through three stages before being accepted: first it’s wrong, then it’s obvious, and finally somebody claims that someone else did it first. In this case, however, the smoking gun went up in smoke when physicists realized that the string theory calculation was subtler than they had thought, and the purported string theory answer actually hadn’t been right.
The truth was that the intersection with work in string theory was very exciting to all of us, and led to important new insights. Localized gravity turned out to have strong overlaps with the most important