Lisa Randall

Spectrum

Lisa Randall is a theoretical physicist, expert on particle physics and cosmology who was a visiting Miller Professor at UC Berkeley in 2011-2012. Author of two books “Warped Passages” and “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” she is currently Professor at Harvard University.

Transcript

Speaker 1: Spectrum's next

Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Welcome to [inaudible]

Speaker 1: can the Science and technology show on k [00:00:30] a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news.

Speaker 3: Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are interviewing Lisa Randall, the author of the recent popular physics book, knocking on Heaven's door, how physics and scientific thinking aluminate the universe and the modern world. She's a visiting Miller professor [00:01:00] in the Physics Department here at cal and our first postdoc was also here as a president's fellow. She is currently a frank be buried junior professor of science at Harvard University and previously wrote the book worked passages and also the Libretto for Hector Perez, hyper music prologue. Lisa Randall, welcome to spectrum. In your book, you talk a lot about the large hadron collider at cern. Can you talk to us more about that?

Speaker 4: So I'm very interested in what's happening at the large Hadron Collider, but I'm also quite interested in just [00:01:30] what it means to do science. After I wrote my first book were passages. A lot of people showed that even when they were interested in science, there were some confusions about just how science advances and how science works in practice. And you know, people think of it as this very definite thing with definite announcers. But right now, and we see this right now with the large hedge on clutter and the Hicks herd, you know, it's messy in the beginning. We don't know the answers and it's important to understand the role of uncertainty, the role of scale and sort of building ideas on top of each other. Having said that, I'll tell you a little bit [00:02:00] about um, surgeon and the large Hadron collider. As a theorist, I'm not actively working on experiments.

Speaker 4: What I do is I suggest what that can look for us, such as exotic ideas, like extra dimensions of space or versions of supersymmetry. But we also tell them how to go about doing the experiments to some extent, or at least discussed that and tried to interpret what they find. But what the large Hadron collider is, it's a giant underground being 27 kilometers in circumference. It collides together hydrogens, which are pro protons, which are our form of Hadrons, and it's doing it at high [00:02:30] energy, the highest energy ever achieved in such collisions. And the goal is via equals MC squared to create particles that have never been made before because they're too heavy. You need high energy to make heavier particles. And in looking at these particles, we want to understand what underlies the structure of the standard model. What is it that gives particles, their math, what is it explains the values of these masses. So it's a long story. That's why there's a whole book, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in it. Have you been to cern to see the itself [00:03:00] officially? I'm a visiting professor there, although I don't have much time to spend there. It was actually really fun. The first time I visited it, it was much more excited than I thought. You know, I'd seen other experiments before, but um, it's just bigger and the magnitude and the people involved are so impressive.

Speaker 5: Uh, what's the motivation for pushing to other link scales to improving our models of the universe?

Speaker 4: That's a great question. And part of it is it's just intrinsically interesting. When people discovered the elements of an Adam, they didn't just find a nucleus and electron, which of course [00:03:30] is very interesting in itself, but they found eventually quantum mechanics. We found the underlying physical law. It's quite different than what we had anticipated. So we're not just looking for new stuff, new particles. We're really looking for the underlying physical structure to understand more deeply what's going on. Of course, that doesn't mean that the standard model is wrong, but it could be that it's not the most basic understanding of particle physics and that could be something deeper and richer that underlies it. So that's part of the goal is I [00:04:00] think that people are just interested in what's there. But also by pushing technology, by pushing scientific thought to the limits, there's all sorts of subsidiary benefits in terms of an educated populace in terms of people being interested and excited and just knowing more about the world.

Speaker 5: We know from just pitting data that adding extra parameters will often lead to a better fits. Is there some justification beyond that for wanting these simple low parameter models?

Speaker 4: We're trying to get a deeper understanding of connections among things. We're not just trying to enumerate them, list [00:04:30] them. We'd like to say that if I measured this quantity, I can predict that one. So the standard model in some sense has very few parameters in terms of there's only three forces plus gravity, these strong, weak and electromagnetic force. And with those parameters you can predict an enormous number of different processes. So it is true that you can of course add from, but you don't necessarily gain understanding by doing that. What we're trying to do is really gain some deeper understanding about the connections, the underlying physical [00:05:00] laws, and it takes a while before we know that we've achieved that.

Speaker 5: I'd also like to sort of touch on testability of different models. So in both war passages and the knocking on heaven story, you talk about your own work with extra dimensional space.

Speaker 4: The dimensions of course are just sort of the stage. They're the setting and so, um, in fact, we don't, we generally only think about having one additional dimension other than the three we know about left right forward, backward, up, down. The idea is that there could be an extra dimension. Put My collaborator Robin Syndrome and I were interested in this extra dimension for a couple of reasons. [00:05:30] One is just to understand abstractly what's going on. We had actually set out to explore, but we found accidentally you could have even an infinite extra dimension that has no visible consequences. In other words, something as dramatic as an infinite to mention could be untestable. The other side of the coin though is that there is a version of the series where it actually explains why particle messes are what they are. We're answers something we call the hierarchy problem, which can be interpreted as why gravity is so weak compared to the other fundamental forces.

Speaker 4: Gravity [00:06:00] might not seem that weak because after all, we have the entire earth acting on us, but from the point of view of fundamental particles, gravity is extraordinarily weak. And by having an extra dimension, we can hope to explain that in the sense that we found a, what we called a warp to extra dimension, and gravity is strong elsewhere, but very weak where we are at various exponentially quickly as you'd go out in another dimension. Now, what's amazing about that is that like any theory that explains this question of the weakness of gravity and why masses are what they are, it leads to testable predictions [00:06:30] and that's what we're quite excited about at the large Hadron collider. It's looking not only for the Higgs Boson, I don't we can come back to that has to do with how particles acquire their mass, but it's also looking for the theory that explains why these masses are what they are, and that leads to testable consequences at about the energies at the large Hadron collider studies. We could be unlucky and it could be a little bit heavier or we could be lucky and it could be right in range.

Speaker 6: [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum on k a [00:07:00] l x Berkeley. We're talking with Lisa Randall, theoretical particle physicist about her new book knocking on Heaven's door.

Speaker 4: In terms of new tools. Are there things like simulation that you would see value in, in fact of these experiments run in conjunction with simulation? The thing is you can only simulate accurately what you've, what you know about. They certainly simulate what would be the consequences [00:07:30] if some of these ideas were correct, such as extra dimensions or supersymmetry. But then there's no alternative to going out and seeing whether they're actually realized in nature. And can you give us some examples about what we expect to see just besides observations of subatomic particles at a particular mass energy window? Well, actually what we expect to see exacerbations of subatomic particles headed mass energy window, but they're particles with very special properties. And that's part of the art of the kind of, uh, both theory and experiment is to really see what are those [00:08:00] special properties in general, you know, your clients have the protons, protons are in some sense messy objects.

Speaker 4: They have things inside corks, cal together by glue, ones that communicate the strong nuclear force. And so when you collide them together, you get a lot of junk that comes out. And what you have to do is distinguish something new, something we haven't seen before, a particle with different properties from the mess of stuff that comes out of the standard model. So for example, if this warped extra dimensional idea is correct and indeed explains the weakness of gravity particles, like [00:08:30] the ones we know about, they have similar properties in the sense of they interact in similar ways, but they're heavier, they're heavier because it's a reflection of the fact that they have momentum in another dimension because we don't see that dimension directly. We interpret that as additional math. So you would look for particles that have very particular properties related to the ones we know about, but they're heavier. So that would be one example. And because they had these very particular properties, you can it and say this is in fact a Calusa client particle. There's another version of potential [00:09:00] solution called super symmetry. And in that case, for every particle we know about, there's an associated particle that's again heavier but would have the same charges. And related interactions. So again, we have a very definite idea of what these particles should look like. And so there are very definite search strategies

Speaker 5: on sort of link scales. You look at not only subatomic particles but dark energy and dark matter which are associated with cosmology, which you also hope to observe at the LHC or are there other experiments that might test theories about that?

Speaker 4: So we have to be clear here on the large [00:09:30] Hadron collider is primarily designed to do particle physics and answer these questions about mass that we keep alluding to. However, there is a possibility that he could also shed light on dark matter. So first of all, dark matter, it's actual matter. It's actual stuff that clumps just like the matter we know about, but it doesn't interact with light. It's really transparent matter. Now dark energy on the other hand is a whole other beast. It's not particles, it doesn't clump. It does. It spreads out throughout the universe. So the large Hadron collider won't shed light on dark energy. However, there [00:10:00] is a chance it could shed light on dark matter. And the reason for that is what could be just a coincidence or it could be some deep underlying clue which is that if a particle is stable and neutral, the states did not interact with light and has the kind of mass that can be produced at the large Hadron collider.

Speaker 4: If it has those properties and you just trace its cosmological evolution, what's happened to it since the beginning of time because it's heavy, there's not that much left of it today. It turns out to have just about the right amount to account for [00:10:30] the measured value of the dark matter measured through its gravitational effects which makes many people think that there is a chance to produce and find out about dark matter at the large Hadron collider. Of course, because it interacts so weekly, it's a very indirect thing. You'd have to produce something else that then could decay into it or produce it. Having said that, there are also a lot of very exciting experiments, J and talk a little bit about them looking much more directly for dark matter. Really looking for it either because it annihilates in the sky and they can see what comes out of it or dark matter actually [00:11:00] leaves a signal in some big underground vat of stuff. And so it recoils and you see a little bit of evidence there. So there are many more directed experiments for dark matter.

Speaker 5: So you're both a practicing theoretical physicist in both popularized and communicate science and physics through books or through parents is like this. How does this sort of science outreach or advocacy sort of feed into your own research and vice versa.

Speaker 4: But, and in terms of actual research on the whole, it means that I just have less time to try. I'm afraid, [00:11:30] but, but what I do do it, it's very directed and, and I do feel like if I'm doing stuff, it should be interesting and important. So I've managed to um, also do some very interesting research and I have to say after doing a lot of book talks in the fall, I was quite happy to visit surgeon and just get back to research too. Do you think all scientists should have the same sort of ability to communicate with the public? Absolutely not. I think, I mean, I, you know, and I a self to never thought I would do this kind of thing. Actually when I started out it was only after I, you know, I basically, I wrote some papers that really became like the most cited [00:12:00] papers around and I just thought, you know, people who really want to understand science, they should have access to it.

Speaker 4: You know, there's some very general broad books and there's very specific, but I thought, you know, I'd like to do something where you sort of really tell the full story of really how science is really happening. And I didn't know I would do a second book, but like I said, I'm sort of inspired a little bit by just wanting to explain really the nature of science in a way that would get rid of some of the silly arguments that you sometimes see in the newspaper or whatever I did. Just to really understand how it works. How much do you think the general public should know about [00:12:30] science? More than I do. I don't know. Um, I don't think they have to know about everything going on at the [inaudible] client or unless they want to. I think that what I'm doing is providing access to that detailed information, but I do think that they should understand just the nature of scientific thinking, what, you know, very broad brush, statistical thought, what it means to be right and wrong, how theories build on each other and what it means to have an approximation and to understand that science really involves that sort of middle ground.

Speaker 4: I think also, [00:13:00] you know, to understand risk better and to understand what goes into, um, the ways we think about risks so people are more prepared to deal with it, what it is that allows us to put new ideas together, both in science and, and in art. So I think all of these things are, we're just, we've just would have more interesting discussions and more productive discussions if people were more aware of, you know, sort of basic mathematics and basic statistical thought. Can you talk about your imagination for us a bit. It's very hard to talk about [00:13:30] one's imagination. I will say that what I, one thing I like about scientists, it's sort of constrained creativity. You sort of have definite problems to focus on where you have a world of ideas to think about, but you have these very definite problems and so definite marks of progress when you've connected various things that seems to totally disparate or find some underlying connections. And especially if you can do it in a way that can be tested and eventually tested correctly.

Speaker 6: It's a spectrum on k eight LX Brooklyn. [00:14:00] We're talking with Lisa Randall, theoretical physicist coming up. She talks about the intersection of art and science [inaudible]

Speaker 4: so your latest book, a mix, several musical illusions including the title of course. Uh, and you wrote the Libretto too. Do you yourself have a strong interest in music? It's a little embarrassing. I think where my major interests in music is that lyrics stick in my head whether I want them to or not. So I think I actually, I come in [00:14:30] probably more from a work point of view. The word stick in my head, although tunes they stick it in my head with tunes and sometimes, but right in Libretto, um, was I was just a lucky opportunity. In fact, it was so different from anything I'd thought about. Um, you know, I just finished writing war passages, which was a book where it tried to tie together really 20th century physics thought and really build up to where we are today in terms of particle string theory and the ideas I've worked on about extra dimensions of space.

Speaker 4: And it was really a challenge to put it all into a linear order. And then, um, you know, I hadn't [00:15:00] many sort of writers and artists contact me, but the composer Hetero Pero just had this really interesting idea. The idea was to really put physics into the opera in a way that they don't usually do. You know, you'll have movies or books or whatever about artists or writers, but you never actually see them doing what they do. So the, it was kind of interesting idea to have actual physics and she was actually a physicist and a composer. One of the protagonists. I like the idea of sort of the unifying theme of sort of what drives discovery, what drives creative thought, both for artists [00:15:30] and for scientists. And so having the, having an extra dimension of space seemed like a really nice metaphor for that once.

Speaker 4: And it was wonderful to work with Hector because, you know, I'd never done something like this so we could work together. He could tell me the kinds of things he needed or wanted. We had Matthew Ritchie, the artists come on board to do the set. So it was just an at a premiere at the Pompidou Center. So how good is that? So, so it was just a brilliant opportunity. So, so yes, I do like music, but probably, um, this is a lot of people around who are far more expert than I am. Well, you know, I also co [00:16:00] curated an art exhibit, um, on the theme of scale. Obviously it was something I was thinking about a lot. Brian's buck. And we had artists who sort of reflected on scale both the way artists do, but also the way scientists do. The idea was sort of not to just have art representing science, but to take a theme that both artists and scientists think about a lot and see if they could work with that and so have physics or biology feed into it if they wanted to, but it didn't have to.

Speaker 4: So a couple of pieces scientifically related, but mostly it was abstract art and it was great. I do think I, in fact, I was just on a panel discussion, um, [00:16:30] the last couple of days, um, from the Radcliffe Institute talking about science and art in the crossroads. And it's just, it's a very exciting time for that. There's some good, good art coming out of it and there's some bad art coming out of it, but it's a time where we're sort of thinking what it means. And I think for different people it means different things. I mean, for me, because the science I do is so abstract, I find it nice way to communicate, to sort of introduce people to ideas. And in fact, we saw that even with the people at the Pompidou Center who at first were very skeptical of this American physicist writing a Libretto [00:17:00] for their opera, but then really came to embrace the project and was so excited about the idea of physics itself and also representing physics in this opera.

Speaker 4: Your most recent book actually talks quite a bit about religion. Science and religion are sort of often pitted against one another. Can you talk about that a bit? Um, I thought it was important. I didn't want to extensively dwell on that. It wasn't a book about that, but I thought I would discuss two of the ideas that have had struck me as important. One was really sort of where, where do, where does scientific and religious thought really diverged so that we can actually have a productive [00:17:30] conversation about it and the other, so there were two chapters. One was about that essentially, and one was about why do we care? Why is this issue considered so important? For the first issue it had to do is I think a lot of people will sort of say I'm spiritual, but I like science. But the question is what does that mean?

Speaker 4: What does it mean to be spiritual? And so just to really define what a scientific way of thinking is in terms of if you believe spirituality has to do with a way of thinking about the world. Science would say, well the way of thinking about the world is rooted in some sort of physical [00:18:00] substrate. And so if that's true, does that mean that's petroleum is affecting individual neurons? How, how exactly is that working? So trust to sort of isolate what the difference is in terms of how you would approach the problem, what it is you're thinking about. And I do think that there are very different ways of at a fundamental level of thinking about it, of course, as a social or psychological phenomenon that's entirely different story. And of course any kind of spirituality, religion can play a big role for people, but that's not the same as actually understanding how things work.

Speaker 4: And understanding [00:18:30] either how you make your decisions or how planets move or anything, so I thought it was just important to get that. To me to be clear about that in terms of why we care, I think it really is sort of where people feel more in control. Do you think that science is helping us control our environment and giving us breakthroughs that allows us to have a better world or do you think that you'd rather see some higher authority takeover? I like to think that we have the ability to understand more and be able to move forward. Sometimes scientists [00:19:00] are seen as very egotistical because they think they can figure things out for themselves, but actually scientists are questioning their, they're trying to understand things they're not taking for granted that we, that we know the answers and I think that's a wonderful way to approach the world.

Speaker 6: You are tuned to k a l x Berkley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Lisa rambled, theoretical particle physicist and often in the coming segments she talks about scientific outreach.

Speaker 4: [00:19:30] We as scientists sometimes succumb to marketing. I mean the hangs flows on is nicknamed the God particle by some. Um, do you think that this hurts us or helps us? Uh, I, in fact I say we shouldn't take the name of the Higgs Boson in vain. And so I don't, I mean I think there is marketing and it happens. It's different because we're talking to different people. We tend to say we're talking to the public, but the public or different people, I mean, some people will already be interested in science and want to know what's really going on. There are other people who like [00:20:00] the people at the Pompidou Center who'd never heard a strength or you'd never heard of extra dimensions. And this was a way of introducing them to the idea. And for those people, maybe it's not so bad to say that God particles catch someone's eye and then, and then actually tell them what's really going on.

Speaker 4: And what was really interesting, um, when, when they had some evidence for the Higgs Boson back in December, I was asked to write a piece for Newsweek and they were like, well, of course you'll tell us how this changes the world. And I said, well, it's not really changing the world. Like, well why is everyone so interested as I was like, I don't know. So it became kind of an article about the fact that people are interested [00:20:30] even though it doesn't necessarily directly change the world. And I think there is a level that once people start thinking about it, it becomes intrinsically interesting and it's after all, if you think about the things that people get fascinated by, um, it doesn't, it doesn't have to change the world. It can be something that just captures our interest and certainly understanding the world at a deeper level falls into that category.

Speaker 4: Do you think science funding in this country is diminishing or stable, especially for big projects? No, I think it's a good question. And I think we're at a, at a critical juncture where we do seem [00:21:00] to be in danger of losing that. And I think that actually isn't as much a question of just interest, but which sort of short term versus longterm thinking. You know, to the extent that science funding is increasing, it's more for short term projects. Let's try to solve this problem. And often that's not the way big science advances or there are major scientific advances. Sometimes you just have to jump in the water and just hope that things will happen. And not just blindly. I mean, you go into the deep end, you go in the right part and you know what, you know what you're looking for. [00:21:30] But a lot of scientific discoveries had consequences.

Speaker 4: No one anticipated. I mean, we're just talking about lunch. Even when the electron was discovered, they were like, well, that's useless. Um, you know, it's, it's, people don't know what's gonna come out of it, but major things come out of it. And certainly, um, having attention to science has, has never failed in the past. I mean, there's no society that's paid a lot of attention to science that has failed because of it. It's easy to sort of point to the technological innovations who's benefiting to the general public and telling them they want science that way. But how do you sort [00:22:00] of tie that to the question of how much science should be funded and especially which scientific projects should be funded? That's a very specific question that one would have to do on a case by case basis. I think that the kind of physics I do, it's deep fundamental physics.

Speaker 4: It can only be done experimentally by these sorts of big projects and so it's just one direction to go in. I think there's a lot of attempt in just sort of smaller projects and those will have, could have important consequences, but it's very easy to overstate because especially things that are biological, they seem so directly [00:22:30] related to human beings. But you know, it's crazy. I mean quantum mechanics, it's couldn't seem more abstract than that, but the electronics where evolution came out of that through semiconductors and that of course has greatly affected our lives. So it isn't something where it's very, and I actually talk about cost benefit analysis and in applied to science or applied more generally. You know, we really want to be able to pin numbers and to pin probabilities into, but there are cases where we can't and we have to acknowledge that we have to acknowledge the uncertainties in, in doing this.

Speaker 4: There's a lot of interesting questions just in particle physics [00:23:00] and we have these experiments now and I think, uh, and particularly during sort of the public stuff and, and science, I mean if ever our physics fails or doesn't work or whatever, I mean there's certainly were interesting questions and I think about them. I talk to people. I mean, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff. It's interesting to reflect on it and talk to colleagues, find out whether it's similar in different in different types of sciences. Find out about other scientific advances. Certainly physics isn't the only field making advances today and to really not only the kind of physics I do, Emmy [inaudible] [00:23:30] is she sort of a hero of yours here? I don't, I don't have heroes. I know people are always really disappointed that, you know, they were like, so who are your heroes?

Speaker 4: I'm like, well I don't have, I mean what, I do have a science, you know, I think there's science that I really appreciate and I think she was one of the people that made interesting advances and it was exciting when I found out that it was a woman because you don't learn about many women in your elementary physics classes. Not as many people have heard of her as I've heard of some of the other scientists. And it's, it's interesting. Are there other salient [00:24:00] people active now that you refer to quite often follow their work closely? You know, one of the fun things about having the book be over is just visiting other places. Might not even people that I hadn't known about or heard of can be doing interesting things. It turns out so it's been fun catching up and finding out what people are doing.

Speaker 4: But um, overall, overall I think the field will go forward with lots of people contributing. And is that a huge challenge? Just trying to keep up with all the information that's out there. The answer is sort of yes or no. I mean I think I often keep up by doing stuff [00:24:30] and in fact I, you know, I was sort of lucky in the sense that as soon as the book was kind of done, I ended up doing a project that actually was sort of kind of central to where people are going today in terms of thinking about supersymmetry in fact. And so, um, and to the extent that I can get involved right away, which is sometimes easier when you have some interesting idea about something or whatever. Um, that's quite helpful. Is there anything that you would want to mention about the predominance of matter over anti matter?

Speaker 4: Well, that's a, that's a big scientific [00:25:00] question about barrier genesis. It's called how, why there's more baryons what we call them than anti barons, more protons and antiprotons. In fact, it's something I've gotten involved with in the context of dark matter. And the reason for that, which is that the amount of energy and dark matter, it's about six times the amount of energy and ordinary matter. In principle, it could have been, you know, a factor of a trillion off. So the fact that they're so similar seems to indicate there could be a connection between the creation of dark matter and the creation of ordinary matter. So it's actually quite an interesting research problem [00:25:30] right now. Are you going to write a third book or are you, I don't have immediate plans, but a, I didn't have a media plan so, and told me, I was like, yeah, I don't remember where I talked to you after you wrote your first book. You said you'd never write another book. I completely forget ever saying that so, so I, I wouldn't rule it out, but I don't know what I'm going to do yet. Elisa Randall, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much for that.

Speaker 6: [inaudible] [00:26:00] bringing a feature of spectrums to mention a few of the science and technology events happening in the bay area.

Speaker 4: Here's Rick with the calendar. The reason for reason and the center for inquiry are hosting Speaker Mark Edward, who will discuss his book, Psychic Blues, Confessions of a conflicted medium on Saturday, July 7th at Kelly's Irish pub, five 30 Jackson Street in San Francisco. [00:26:30] This free talk starts at 5:00 PM with doors at four 30 with decades of experience practicing mental magic, Edward has worked on both sides of the psychic fence. He believes that most of the psychic business

Speaker 3: are out and out scam artists and that the common need to believe in things supernatural is merely a part of human nature. From phone psyche to headliner at the famed Magic Castle Mark Edward will recount his experiences and expose techniques you used in the multibillion dollar [00:27:00] psychic industry. For more information, visit reason for reason.org. That's the reason the number four reason. Dot. O r.G , the Leonardo art science evening rendezvous or laser. This month will be at the University of San Francisco at 6:45 PM on Monday, July 9th the talks at this free meeting include Ian winters presenting on responsive installations based on attention, social [00:27:30] memory and the use of motion capture analysis. Christina smoke a on synthetic biology, the next generation of biotechnology. Mark Jacobson on a plan to power the world for all purposes with wind, water and the sun and both the UC Berkeley professor of anthropology, Paul Rainbow and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Adrian van Allen on synthetic biology and security. You can find more information on [00:28:00] how to [e-mail] now, Lisa cabbage with the news story

Speaker 7: using remote sensing technology, researchers from Stanford University have discovered the largest ever bloom of phytoplankton buried underneath the Arctic Ice Shelf, four times more concentrated than open ocean blooms. They came across this bloom by accident in Alaska as Chuck CISI while cutting through ice that was only a meter thick compared to the three meter thickness [00:28:30] in the past. Under ice. Blooms are rarely seen microscopic phytoplankton that rely on the sun for nutrients and form the base of the Arctic Food Web as Climate Change thins. The Arctic ice sheet completing the summer cycle earlier, the timing of the under ice bloom could throw off the timing of the entire Arctic food web. When the ice sheet melt in the spring, Su plankton moves into areas of open water to feed on phytoplankton and in turn become food for fish. If they follow the seasons rather [00:29:00] than the blooms, they may arrive too late affecting larger animals like whales.

Speaker 3: [inaudible]

Speaker 2: [inaudible].

Speaker 6: The music card during the show is by Los Donna David from his album folk and acoustic is made available through creative Commons attribution license 3.0

Speaker 2: [inaudible]

Speaker 6: production assistance by Lisa cabbage

Speaker 2: [inaudible].

Speaker 6: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments [00:29:30] about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l [e-mail] join us in two at this same

Speaker 2: time.

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