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NATURE|Vol 460|9 July 2009 OPINION French, and Spanish pillaging of native Ameri- eties for the same reason everyone else does: familiar world is confined to a four-dimensional can resources in the sixteenth and seventeenth economic success. space-time ‘brane’ that lies, in her theory, within centuries, during the heyday of piracy. The Invisible Hook is a good addition to a larger five-dimensional ‘hyperspace’. Moving Sovereign governments may have legalized the genre of popular economics: a fun and into the fifth dimension takes the fictional trav- such plundering, but they were not necessarily enlightening read, and rock solid in its schol- eller into regions of vastly magnified gravity that more moral than the pirates who re-plundered arly bona fides. ■ distorts other attributes of reality and experi- that same wealth. Both used the threat of force, Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine, ence: time, distance, energy and mass. as Leeson reminds us. He does not argue for a columnist for Scientific American, and author of The challenge was to depict this exotic jour- moral equivalency, rather he explains that The Mind of the Market. ney as a beautiful experience for the audience. pirates form their own versions of civil soci- e-mail: [email protected] Parra samples the sounds produced by the sing- ers and instruments and passes them through an elaborate digital system of real-time signal processing and synthesis. The instrumental and vocal scores are of stunning complexity, Solo journey to a fifth dimension with more than 100 parameters of digital trans- formation, which evolve as the plot progresses. Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in sical mechanics. “It was the right kind of music The warping of physical time, as experienced Seven Planes for this kind of physics precisely because it is by Ellett’s character, for example, is expressed Hèctor Parra and Lisa Randall esoteric,” says Randall. through modulations of rhythm and the ‘gran- Pompidou Centre, Paris. 14–15 June 2009 The plot of Hypermusic is simple: a pair of ularity’ of the synthesized music. lovers, played by Ellett and Bobby, separate The processed sounds are projected into the because the woman feels something is missing, auditorium from an array of speakers, using An opera about string theory and five- both in her life and in physics theory. Both char- signal delays that constantly shift the apparent dimensional space is hard to imagine. But one acters are physicists; the female protagonist is locations of their sources. The audience hears premiered recently in Paris. also a composer. In the middle of the hour-long this complex aural texture blended with the Hypermusic Prologue is a collaboration show, she takes a trip into the fifth dimension, sounds produced directly by singers and instru- between composer Hèctor Parra and Lisa Ran- which she experiences with vivid delight. “It is mentalists. “You hear 70% the real musicians dall, professor of theoretical physics at Harvard a nice metaphor for exploring a new world,” and 30% electronics, on average,” Parra says. University and author of Warped Passages: says Randall. “Of course, it’s unrealistic.” Also The set is an articulated screen on which Unravelling the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions unrealistic is that the male character seems to artist Matthew Ritchie projects video images (Allen Lane, 2005), an account of cutting-edge be intellectually stuck in pre-Einstein physics. evoking the two characters’ conflicting per- physics, including string theory, and the pos- Randall added that “just for humour value”. spectives. The kaleidoscopic, lava-lamp style sibility of additional spatial dimensions of the images evokes a psychedelic atmos- beyond those we sense. Singers James phere that seems slightly out of register Bobby and Charlotte Ellett sang Ran- with the idea that the fifth dimension is dall’s libretto, accompanied by musi- physically real. cians and technicians of the Paris-based By contrast, Lisa Randall is a scientist DR; L. HOSSEPIED Ensemble Intercontemporain. All gave who stays close to experimental data. “I’m admirable performances, with flashes not a string theorist, I’m a model-builder,” of startling beauty. she says. “One of my fears was that by the Parra says that when he first readread time this happened we’d find out it wasn’t Warped Passages, some- even right.” Experiments testing her ideas thing clicked. “For me it are expected to run in the Large Hadron was a real discovery,” he Collider at CERN, Europe’s particle- said. “For a few months I physics laboratory near Geneva, Swit- imagined reality vibrating Lisa Randall, physicist and librettist of zerland, after it starts up again later this year. like strings.” The composer, Hypermusic Prologue; opera set above. With luck, they might coincide with upcoming who studied engineering performances of Hypermusic. “It’s a good time before choosing music and Psychological depth gets intention- for science to inform art,” says Randall. “People whose father is a physicist, allya short shrift. “The two characters are interested. If there were extra dimensions, imagined a chamber opera are schemes, sketches,” Parra explains. people would want to know.” ■ in which music represented theth phenomena h AndAdth the quantity of technical language in the Stefan Michalowski is a former particle physicist, of high-energy physics. He contacted Randall, libretto is breathtaking. “There’s more physics currently working on intergovernmental science who was keen to try a new genre. “In a book, in it than I had intended,” says Randall. The policy; Georgia Smith writes for the International if someone gets to some idea that they don’t composer and the production designer con- Herald Tribune’s ‘Ear for Opera’ series. understand, they will stop”, she explains. “You vinced her to include more, for atmosphere. e-mails: [email protected]; [email protected] have more licence in a dramatic performance.” “When you watch a movie about a painter you Parra’s music is experimental, filled with glit- don’t learn how to paint,” she explains. “But Hypermusic Prologue will be performed on 27–28 tering, jarring, liquid, fractured-icicle sounds, you learn what it was for the painter to get November at Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, often electronically generated. It is as far from immersed into that world.” Spain, and on 6 December in the Grand Auditorium classical harmony as string theory is from clas- Randall describes in Warped Passages how our of the Philharmonie, Luxembourg. 177 © 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. 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