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
We live in a world where there are many risks, and it's high time we start taking seriously which ones we should be worried about.
There can sometimes be this fear among laypeople: 'I don't understand everything in science perfectly, so I just can't say anything about it.' I think it's good to know that we scientists are also confused some of the time.
In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there. You look inside the atom, and eventually you discover quarks. Who would have thought that?
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.
If you are a responsible scientist, you are going to present your new results in a paper, and maybe if, over time, things are established, and it's prime time for the public to hear about it, then you include it in a book.
I can be a good listener. I can ask the right questions a lot of the time.
The scientist is also a composer... You could think of science as discovering one particular thing - a supernova or whatever. You could also think of it as discovering this whole new way of seeing the world.
The standard model of particle physics describes forces and particles very well, but when you throw gravity into the equation, it all falls apart. You have to fudge the figures to make it work.
The stuff we're really famous for was really lucky in a way.
I started out working on supersymmetry. The theory predicts that for every particle we know about, there will be an additional particle.
The thing I will say is that probably culturally, women are treated differently, which means, I think, you're criticized more, you have to listen a little bit more, you have to justify yourself.
Scientific experiments are expensive, and people are entitled to know about them if they want to. I think it is very difficult to convey ideas.
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions.
We have this very clean picture of science, you know, these well-established rules with which we make predictions. But when you're really doing science, when you're doing research, you're at the edge of what we know.