AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion

Biography

Nima Arkani-Hamed is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Harvard University. He received his PhD from the University of California - Berkeley. His research in theoretical physics is driven by attempting to address the "hierarchy problem" and the "cosmological constant problem." Together with Savas Dimopoulos and Gia Dvali, he suggested that the extreme weakness of gravity can be attributed to the existence of large extra dimensions of space, perhaps as large as 100 microns in size, with the scale of quantum gravity lowered to the electroweak scale. This opens up the possibility that quantum gravitational effects can be probed at accelerators and even in table-top experiments. Most recently, together with Dimopoulos, he has explored the possibility that the fine-tunings for the cosmological constant and hierarchy problems find a common explanation within a huge landscape of possible low-energy worlds that may exist in string theory, leading to a novel proposal for "split" supersymmetry at the large hadron collider.