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  7:30 pm, Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Fairmont Social Lounge, St. John's College

Not Your Grandfather's Universe

Lenny Susskind

Stanford University

The physical universe is nothing like we thought, even as little as ten years ago. The prevailing paradigm of a small universe a mere ten billion light years in size--a universe with the same "knowable" laws of physics everywhere--is giving way to a much grander vision of a tremendously large "multiverse," similar in many ways to the diversity of the biological world. And the DNA of each local pocket is the enormously variable microscopic structures of String Theory. At the same time, the solid world of experience, filled with matter, energy, and information, is being replaced by the remarkable notion that three dimensional space is an illusion, much like the ghostly image created by a hologram.

These "stranger than fiction" ideas are not idle fantasies, but are becoming a useful part of mainstream physics, having application from cosmology to mundane nuclear physics.


Find out more by visiting his website.

Additional resources for this talk: video, slides.