Thinking Outside the Hypercube

Model building and even creativity itself sometimes get a bad rap in
physics, either because ideas seem too out of the blue or because they
don’t seem to be derived from the rigorous mathematical deductions
present in some other types of physics fields. In this talk I explain
why both of these characterizations are misleading at best, and how
model building is designed to address real physical phenomena in a
rigorous manner. I will illustrate these claims with the history of the
ideas that went into formulating “RS1” and “RS2”, theories of a warped
extra dimension that were motivated by physical problems but tied into a
wide variety of theoretical frameworks and even led to upending some
commonly accepted theoretical wisdom.