Lisa Randall
Lisa Randall
Lisa Randallis an American theoretical physicist and an expert on particle physics and cosmology. She is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science on the physics faculty of Harvard University. Her research includes elementary particles and fundamental forces and she has developed and studied a wide variety of models, the most recent involving extra dimensions of space. She has advanced the understanding and testing of the Standard Model, supersymmetry, possible solutions to the hierarchy problem concerning the relative weakness...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhysicist
Date of Birth18 June 1962
CountryUnited States of America
I think simplicity is a good guide: The more economical a theory, the better.
Harvard freshmen are smart, interested, and excited, and it's fun hearing their different perspectives and stuff that they will share.
I was always good at math, but I was good at everything. It sounds obnoxious, but I was just smart. In school, it's kind of obvious when you're learning things faster than other kids.
A musical, like most religions, provides the audience or followers with a sense of belonging. Religious services, on the other hand, with their staged performances, invigorating songs, popular wisdom and shared experience, are almost a form of community theater.
Neuroscience is exciting. Understanding how thoughts work, how connections are made, how the memory works, how we process information, how information is stored - it's all fascinating.
People who dismiss science in favor of religion sometimes confuse the challenge of rigorously understanding the world with a deliberate intellectual exclusion that leads them to mistrust scientists and, to their detriment, what they discover.
There are women for whom family is a priority, and they do it. It just wasn't as much a priority for me.
When I came to Harvard, I was debating between math and science, and I guess I thought in the end I wanted something that could connect to the real world. I liked puzzle-solving and connections.
When I was in school, I liked math because all the problems had answers. Everything else seemed very subjective.
What I do is very theoretical. It won't necessarily have implications for anything anyone is doing tomorrow, yet you know that there's a sense of progress in science, and as we understand more, it just turns out that, somehow, the world evolves with us.
You have principles. You test them as accurately as you can. Eventually, they might break down.
You learn that the interest is in what you don't yet know and that theories evolve. But we nonetheless have progress and improved knowledge over time.
I would say it's important for scientists to speak out when they can and when they can be listened to.
Physicists are interested in measuring neutrino properties because they tell us about the structure of the Standard Model, the well-tested theory that describes matter's most basic elements and interactions.