Informant38

"I guess it's fair to say that we weren't believed by everyone at first"

"...different possibilities. One is that the universe we live in is the Planck brane, which localizes the graviton.
Another is that we live on a second brane, which is the case where we discussed the hierarchy problem.
We generally assume that we live on a brane, but it may not be the brane on which gravity is concentrated. Suppose that gravity is highly concentrated near what I'll call the Planck brane. So gravity is concentrated on one brane, the Planck brane, and we live on a second brane, not precisely on top of the first brane but a little apart. Gravity on our second brane would appear to be weak. And that's precisely what we wanted to explain: why gravity appears to be so weak.
That's the hierarchy problem - why gravity is so weak. And this follows from the key insight that we don't actually have to talk about how to get a huge mass scale; we can talk about why gravity is so weak."

So why has this paper generated so much interest and so many citations?

"Well, it went in the face of what everyone who has studied gravity has believed.
We always thought if we have extra dimensions, we had to do what's called compactifying them, which is to say they curl up so that they can't be seen from our point of view.
If you look at distance scales larger than the size of this curled-up dimension, the physics would reduce to being four-dimensional again. In the standard "conventional" scenario, if you have extra dimensions, they are curled up very small.
The reasoning is as follows: if you probe distance scales smaller than the extra dimension, you would see higher dimensional physics, for example, one over r-cubed as the gravitational force scale. However, if you look at distance scales bigger than these extra dimensions, it would look like four-dimensional physics.
You can understand it in a very intuitive way: if you look at a garden hose, for instance, far away it looks like a one-dimensional line. Only up close do you realize it's actually a cylinder. So if you look from far enough away - that is, only look on large distance scales - you wouldn't know these other dimensions were there.
So we've known this compactification could work. You could have the extra dimensions of string theory, but you curl them up and you wouldn't see them.
It wasn't thought to be possible to have a theory with extra dimensions that wouldn't compactify and still have the physics reduce to four-dimensional physics here.
So our theory, that you could have an infinite extra dimension that wasn't compactified, was a radical departure from conventional wisdom."

Lisa Randall/ESI Special Topics Interview June.02
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An infinite number of infinite "extra dimensions".
And the one we're in is infinite.
And there's something out "there" already besides just inanimate stuff. More than one something.
The surge of Western Man across the chilly gray Atlantic, and the consequent explosions of bounty and profit in the various local European economies that got hold of enough ships to carry it home and all that grew out of that was made possible by an attitude of virginal nature being found - discovered - and made proprietary - conquered - by the relatively mighty finders.
There was very little energy expended on conversing with what was already here - some trivial attempts at sizing up the local humans, but none at all concerned with the big green face of the land as it was discovered. And it was oh so green back then.
Speaking to, and listening to, the wilderness was insane, diabolical, pagan. An absurdity, talking to trees and birds and such things. Ridiculous.
And the observable fact of many of the indigenous doing that very thing, believing that they did it anyway, made them that much more liable to conquest and enslavement and dispossession. They were heathens
And it is this attitude, stripped of its immediate dogma and ritual, that is brought to the confrontation with the inevitable and undeniable fact of the infinite all around us.
So we get stuck there.
The jots-and-tittles crowd want rules to emerge, so they can be worked around. Thus the mistake of European colonialism would be violating the rule that it's wrong to steal from natives, or that it's wrong to make slaves out of simpler more primitive people, or that cutting down all the trees and ruining the rivers is bad - the list could be quite long and still fairly accurate but the real mistake came right at the beginning - it's the attitude going in, the lack of prayer, the absence of humility.