Lisa Randall Quotes & Sayings

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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

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

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

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

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. — Lisa Randall

I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true ... If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons. — Lisa Randall

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

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

We often fail to notice things that we are not expecting. — Lisa Randall

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

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. — Lisa Randall

Science is a combination of theory and experiment and the two together are how you make progress. — Lisa Randall

Travel at faster than the speed of light certainly can have dramatic implications that are difficult to understand, such as time travel. — Lisa Randall

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

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. — Lisa Randall

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

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

Probably if you look like Tyra Banks, it probably is hard, even if you are really smart, for people to take - it surprises some. — Lisa Randall

I don't think we have reached a point where art really translates into science. Perhaps for some people, having good visuals can help translate into science. — Lisa Randall

For me, the most absorbing films are those that address big questions and real ideas but embody them in small examples that we can appreciate and comprehend. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

With general relativity, we know that before gravity can act, spacetime has to deform. This process does not happen instantaneously. It takes time. Gravity waves travel at the speed of light. Gravitational effects can kick in at a given position only after the time it takes for a signal to travel there and distort spacetime. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

Although I was first drawn to math and science by the certainty they promised, today I find the unanswered questions and the unexpected connections at least as attractive. — Lisa Randall

Religion can have psychological and social roles, but in terms of really explaining how things work, science works differently. Science is based on material elements at the core. — Lisa Randall

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

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

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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

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. — Lisa Randall

You can be only a modest distance away from the gravity brane, and gravity will be incredibly weak. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

I really do think that science has an internal structure, and it makes sense, and we can test it. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

If such external influences are intrinsic to religion, then logic and scientific thought dictate that there must be a mechanism by which this influence is transmitted. A religious or spiritual belief that involves an invisible undetectable force that nonetheless influences human actions and behavior or that of the world itself produces a situation in which a believer has no choice but to have faith and abandon logic
or simply not care. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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

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. — Lisa Randall

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

There are many aspects of time we just do not understand. That's the thing about writing a popular book: You realize the things you understand because for those you can give a really simple explanation. But some things about time I just don't know how to give simple explanations for, even though I can tell you mathematically what's going on. — Lisa Randall

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

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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

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. — Lisa Randall

Despite my resistance to hyperbole, the LHC belongs to a world that can only be described with superlatives. It is not merely large: the LHC is the biggest machine ever built. It is not merely cold: the 1.9 kelvin (1.9 degrees Celsius above absolute zero) temperature necessary for the LHC's supercomputing magnets to operate is the coldest extended region that we know of in the universe - even colder than outer space. The magnetic field is not merely big: the superconducting dipole magnets generating a magnetic field more than 100,000 times stronger than the Earth's are the strongest magnets in industrial production ever made.

And the extremes don't end there. The vacuum inside the proton-containing tubes, a 10 trillionth of an atmosphere, is the most complete vacuum over the largest region ever produced. The energy of the collisions are the highest ever generated on Earth, allowing us to study the interactions that occurred in the early universe the furthest back in time. — Lisa Randall

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

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

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

I'm not creating the universe. I'm creating a model of the universe, which may or may not be true. — Lisa Randall

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

What makes me different as a scientist is that I'm kind of imaginative. The ideas just happen. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

The problem is that string theory is defined at an energy scale that is about ten million billion times larger than those we can experimentally explore with our current instruments. — Lisa Randall

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

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

I did not set out to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. I'm a particle physicist, and I was actually thinking about dark matter along with some collaborators. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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

[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. — Lisa Randall

Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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

There are women for whom family is a priority, and they do it. It just wasn't as much a priority for me. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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

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

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

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? — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

According to quantum mechanics, at the Planck scale length, instead of a gradually undulating geometry, there should be wild fluctuations and loops and handles of spacetime branching off, the sort of topography that the futuristic Ike encountered. General relativity cannot be used in such untamed territory. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

Sometimes models are surprisingly smart. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

There is real confusion about what it means to be right and wrong - the difference between what spiritual beliefs are and what science is. — Lisa Randall

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. — Lisa Randall

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