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.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Science
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.
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.
When I was in school, I liked math because all the problems had answers. Everything else seemed very subjective.
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.
I considered going into business or becoming a lawyer - not for the money, but for the thrill of problem-solving.
I think simplicity is a good guide: The more economical a theory, the better.
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.
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.
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?
Physicists have yet to understand why the Higgs boson's mass is what it is.
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.
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.
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.
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 can be a good listener. I can ask the right questions a lot of the time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I really do think that science has an internal structure, and it makes sense, and we can test it.
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.
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 women for whom family is a priority, and they do it. It just wasn't as much a priority for me.
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.
You have principles. You test them as accurately as you can. Eventually, they might break down.
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.
I would say it's important for scientists to speak out when they can and when they can be listened to.
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 are a lot of mysteries about quantum mechanics, but they mostly arise in very detailed measurements in controlled settings.
I started out working on supersymmetry. The theory predicts that for every particle we know about, there will be an additional particle.
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.
You can be only a modest distance away from the gravity brane, and gravity will be incredibly weak.
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.
Most physicists like myself won't believe the result until every possible caveat has been investigated and/or the result is confirmed elsewhere.
Travel at faster than the speed of light certainly can have dramatic implications that are difficult to understand, such as time travel.
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.
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.
Both religions and musicals work best with energetic and committed believers. Cynicism or detachment would have destroyed the magic - something true of religion, too.
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.
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.
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.