Of Interest: Harvard theoretical physicist Lisa Randall, along with John Hopkins professor Raman Sundrum, has come up with a possible explanation of why gravity is so weak compared with the other forces of nature. It has something to do with models with warped membranes, dimensions and Oreos.

Before shuffling off this mortal coil, as it were, Douglas Adams left his massive imprint in the landscape of scientific (and hilarious) literature, mostly based on the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything*. Well, recently a Harvard theoretical physicist, Lisa Randall, has gained even more prominent fame than she already achieved (The Guardian of London considers her “one of the most influential living scientists”), for her bottom-up approach to theoretical physics, trying to build models that explain observed phenomena and hoping to discover principles with wider application. She seeks an answer to the universe; specifically the weakness of gravity.

Noted in a longish feature article in Tuesday’s New York Times, she and Johns Hopkins professor Raman Sundrum came up with a possible answer to a decades-long torment for scientists: the question, why is gravity so weak compared with the other forces of nature. Randall and Sundrum’s theory, the study of which involved cookies (continue reading): we are borrowing gravity from another universe.

Their work, as NYT noted, “undermined well-worn concepts like the idea that we can even know how many dimensions of space we live in, or the reality of gravity, space and time.”

Randall’s work is a departure from mainstream physics, in particular from string theory, which has its own take on extra dimensions. As another NYT article, via the International Herald Tribune, noted, string theory posits that the most fundamental constituents of matter and energy are not particles, but infinitesimally small strings and loops that vibrate in 10 dimensions.

Physicists thought it would take a particle accelerator 10 million billion times as powerful as anything on Earth to produce an actual string and test the theory. String theory also requires space-time to have 10 dimensions, not the four (three of space and one of time) that we experience. In the mid-90s, theorists discovered that the theory was even richer, describing not only strings but so-called branes, as in membranes, of all dimensions. As such, our own universe could be a brane, “an island of three dimensions floating in a sea of higher dimension, like a bubble in the sea.” But there could be membranes with five, six, seven or more dimensions coexisting and mingling like weird cosmic soap bubbles in what theorists sometimes call the multiverse.

Randall wondered then whether parallel universes could help solve a vexing problem with a favorite theory of particle physicists, supersymmetry, which was actually invented to solve another problem — “the enormous gulf known as the hierarchy problem between gravity and the other forces.” Randall told NYT, “Na