Lisa Randall Quotations

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There could be a vestige of extra dimensions hidden in your kitchen cabinet.

Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I really liked the fact that it had definite answers.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

You have to be careful when you use beauty as a guide. There are many theories people didn't think were beautiful at the time but did find beautiful later—and vice versa. I think simplicity is a good guide: The more economical a theory, the better.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Sometimes models are surprisingly smart.

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

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

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.

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

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

The market is paying a premium for Siemens, and that premium is being justified on near-term expectations of value creation which we believe will be difficult to realize.