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
The process of science is difficult and challenging. It involves always being aware that your ideas might be right or they might be wrong. I think it's that kind of balance that makes science so interesting.
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.
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.
The best science frequently combines an awareness of broad and significant problems with focus on an apparently small issue or detail that someone very much wants to solve or understand. Sometimes these little problems or inconsistencies turn out to be the clues to big advances.
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.
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.
I actually like seeing how the world - trying to figure out how the world works, how it all fits together. Also, it makes me happy when I feel like things are consistent, when there's some sort of order to the universe.
I do theoretical particle physics. We're trying to understand the most basic structure of matter. And the way you do that is you have to look at really small distances. And to get to small distances, you need high energies.
There are a lot of mysteries about quantum mechanics, but they mostly arise in very detailed measurements in controlled settings.
What makes me different as a scientist is that I'm kind of imaginative. The ideas just happen.
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.
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.
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?
In fairness, I don't think that everyone understands what I say, but I think they understand part of it and part of what the issues are... Just the same way that people like a good painting, I think people really like understanding, knowing about the world.