Warped Passages

Warped Passages

Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions is a book by Lisa Randall, published in 2005, about particle physics in general and additional dimensions of space (cf. Kaluza–Klein theory) in particular. The book has made it to top 50 at amazon.com, making it the world's first successful book on theoretical physics by a female author. She herself characterizes the book as being about physics and the multi-dimensional universe.

She comments that her motivation for writing this book was her "thinking that there were people who wanted a more complete and balanced vision of the current state of physics." She has noticed there is a large audience that thinks physics is about the bizarre or exotic. She observes that when people develop an understanding of the science of particle physics and the experiments that produce the science, people get excited. "The upcoming experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva will test many ideas, including some of the warped extra-dimensional theories I talk about." Another motivation was that she "gambled that there are people who really want to understand the physics and how the many ideas connect."