Lisa Randall Quotes

Secrets of the cosmos will begin to unravel. I, for one, can't wait.

I would say it's important for scientists to speak out when they can and when they can be listened to.

It's not completely obvious what gravity is, fundamentally, or what dimensions are, fundamentally. One of these days we'll understand better what we mean, what is the fundamental thing that's given us space in the first place and dimensions of space in particular.

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.

The universe has its secrets. Extra dimensions of space might be one of them. If so, the universe has been hiding those dimensions, protecting them, keeping them coyly under wraps. From a casual glance, you would never suspect a thing.

The uncertainty principle tells us that it would take infinitely long to measure energy (or mass) with infinite precision, and that the longer a particle lasts, the more accurate our measurement of its energy can be. But if the particle is short-lived and its energy cannot possibly be determined with infinite precision, the energy can temporarily deviate from that of a true long-lived particle. In fact, because of the uncertainty principle, particles will do whatever they can get away with for as long as they can.

If you look through the shelves of science books, you'll find row after row of books written by men. This can be terribly off-putting for women.

I really like that my work is getting more people interested in science.

So, in a sense, looking under the lamppost for dark matter is appropriate.

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.

Organized religion and musicals present tenets to live by that don't entirely make sense but, on the whole, make people who believe them secure, thus giving an appearance of inclusiveness.

Maybe dark matter is denser than we usually assume, kind of like the Milky Way plane.

There are a lot of mysteries about quantum mechanics, but they mostly arise in very detailed measurements in controlled settings.

There could be more to the universe than the three dimensions we are familiar with. They are hidden from us in some way, perhaps because they're tiny or warped. But even if they're invisible, they could affect what we actually observe in the universe.

I think simplicity is a good guide: The more economical a theory, the better.

Basically, I wasn't properly socialized, so it made sense to do physics.

Harvard freshmen are smart, interested, and excited, and it's fun hearing their different perspectives and stuff that they will share.

Most physicists like myself won't believe the result until every possible caveat has been investigated and/or the result is confirmed elsewhere.

Some branes are "slices" inside the space, but others are "slices" that bound space, like slices of bread in a sandwich. Either way, a brane is a domain that has fewer dimensions than the full higher-dimensional space that surrounds or borders it.

I can be a good listener. I can ask the right questions a lot of the time.

I don't necessarily make much art myself, but after I wrote 'Warped Passages,' I was fortunate to get involved a little in the art world. I got invited to write a libretto for what we called a projective opera, and I also got invited to curate an art exhibit.

It's hubris to think that the way we see things is everything there is.

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.

I considered going into business or becoming a lawyer - not for the money, but for the thrill of problem-solving.

Both religions and musicals work best with energetic and committed believers. Cynicism or detachment would have destroyed the magic - something true of religion, too.

[The ceremonial key to the city of Padua] is engraved with a quote from Galileo that is also on display at the physics department of the university...'I deem it of more value to find out a truth about however light a matter than to engage in long disputes about the greatest questions without achieving any truth.

Faith just doesn't have anything to do with what I'm doing as a scientist. It's nice if you can believe in God, because then you see more of a purpose in things. Even if you don't, though, it doesn't mean that there's no purpose. It doesn't mean that there's no goodness. I think that there's a virtue in being good in and of itself. I think that one can work with the world we have.

Nonetheless, in all cases matter tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells matter how to move.

Naively, special relativity would therefore tell us that those particles should be able to travel forwards and backwards in time as well. But so far as we know, neither particles nor anything else we are aware of can actually travel backwards in time. What happens instead is that oppositely charged antiparticles replace the reverse-time-traveling particles. Antiparticles reproduce the effects the reverse-time-traveling particles would have so that even without them, quantum field theory's predictions are compatible with special relativity.

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.

Speculation and the exploration of ideas beyond what we know with certainty are what lead to progress.

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.

You might find it hard to imagine gravity as a weak force, but consider that a small magnet can hold up a paper clip, even though the entire earth is pulling down on it.

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.

Lots of data gets collected through the latest technology today, and not all of it is about people's consumer preferences.

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.

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.

Physics has entered a remarkable era. Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction are now entering our theoretical - and maybe even experimental - grasp. Brand-new theoretical discoveries about extra dimensions have irreversibly changed how particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists now think about the world. The sheer number and pace of discoveries tells us that we've most likely only scratched the surface of the wondrous possibilities that lie in store. Ideas have taken on a life of their own.

If you keep telling girls they're less good at science, that will probably be self-fulfilling. But there are quite a lot of women who are good at it.

All the normal matter in the Milky Way disc is denser than the dark matter that surrounds it ...

Scientists actively approach the door to knowledge - the boundary of the domain of what we know. We question and explore and we change our views when facts and logic force us to do so. We are confident only in what we can verify through experiments or in what we can deduce from experimentally confirmed hypotheses.

Our hypotheses are initially rooted in theoretical consistency and elegance, but ... ultimatel y it is experiment not rigid belief that determines what is correct.

You have principles. You test them as accurately as you can. Eventually, they might break down.

When I was in school, I liked math because all the problems had answers. Everything else seemed very subjective.

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.

The particle's discovery is tremendously exciting. It's also inspirational. Let's just enjoy that for now.

One reason I find anthropic reasoning troublesome is that no one yet knows what might be essential to any possible form of life or even to structures such as galaxies that might support it. I am not as confident as others seem to be that any form of life would be similar to ours.

We certainly don't yet know all the answers. But the universe is about to be pried open.

Physicists have yet to understand why the Higgs boson's mass is what it is.

I started out working on supersymmetry. The theory predicts that for every particle we know about, there will be an additional particle.

I grew up in New York City. I went to museums so much as a kid, and I guess I didn't realize how much it affected me.

We should figure out how to do this so that some parents don't feel disenfranchised, angry and upset. It says a lot about the state of where we are in the city, the role of parents and the reality of small school and combining schools.

I had this illusion that if I kind of dressed badly that I wouldn't stand out. So I actually went out of my way to not look different to the extent I could.

I do try to do high-impact work, and I try to think of ideas people haven't thought about that have broad implications, but I don't restrict myself to that. I try to work on things that I find interesting.

When you're reaching out to people beyond the scientific community, image does matter.

An almost indispensable skill for any creative person is the ability to pose the right questions. Creative people identify promising, exciting, and, most important, accessible routes to progress - and eventually formulate the questions correctly.

One of the nice things about math and science is it's obvious, you get the answer or you don't get the answer.

When it comes to the world around us, is there any choice but to explore?

you can't simply compare a hypothesis to a single competing model and treat that one alternative suggestion as a substitute for all the remaining options.

I don't think about a theory of everything when I do my research. And even if we knew the ultimate underlying theory, how are you going to explain the fact that we're sitting here? Solving string theory won't tell us how humanity was born.

A brane is a distinct region of spacetime that extends through only a (possibly multidimensional) slice of space. The word "membrane" motivated the choice of the word "brane" because membranes, like branes, are layers that either surround or run through a substance.

When people try to use religion to address the natural world, science pushes back on it, and religion has to accommodate the results. Beliefs can be permanent, but beliefs can also be flexible. Personally, if I find out my belief is wrong, I change my mind. I think that's a good way to live.

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.

Scientific research involves going beyond the well-trodden and well-tested ideas and theories that form the core of scientific knowledge. During the time scientists are working things out, some results will be right, and others will be wrong. Over time, the right results will emerge.

Sometimes models are surprisingly smart.

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?