Lisa Randall > Quotes

“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, Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World

“[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, Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World

“The particle’s discovery is tremendously exciting. It’s also inspirational. Let’s just enjoy that for now.”
― Lisa Randall, Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space

“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, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Early in the twentieth century, the physicist Lord Rutherford, best known for his landmark discovery of the atomic nucleus, famously pronounced, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“We often fail to notice things that we are not expecting.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“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, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Lots of data gets collected through the latest technology today, and not all of it is about people's consumer preferences.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Why should we have perfect senses that can directly perceive everything? The big lesson of physics over the centuries is how much is hidden from our view. From”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Recall that the Milky Way is a disk galaxy, meaning most of the stars and gas lie in a thin disk, about 130,000 light-years across but only roughly 2,000 light-years in thickness. The Sun is located at a distance of about 27,000 light-years from the galactic center, and happens at this moment to be close to the galactic midplane—less than 100 light-years away. It is also at the edge of a spiral arm.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“But speculation is the only way to make progress in our understanding.”
― Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

“Science certainly is not the static statement of universal laws we all hear about in elementary school. Nor is it a set of arbitrary rules. Science is an evolving body of knowledge. Many of the ideas we are currently investigating will prove to be wrong or incomplete. Scientific descriptions certainly change as we cross the boundaries that circumscribe what we know and venture into more remote territory where we can glimpse hints of the deeper truths beyond.”
― Lisa Randall, Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World

“But the Universe is by definition a single entity and in principle its components interact. This book explores”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“If particles had mass from the get-go, the theory would have been inconsistent and made nonsensical predictions such as probabilities of energetic particles interacting that were greater than one. Some new ingredient was required to allow for those masses. That”
― Lisa Randall, Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space

“calculations”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“If large extra dimensions solve the hierarchy problem, higher-dimensional gravity would become strong at about a TeV.”
― Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

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

“The warp factor is a function that changes the overall scale for position, time, mass, and energy at each point in the fifth dimension.”
― Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

“The uncertainty principle tells us that you need high-momentum particles to probe or influence physical processes at short distances, and special relativity relates that momentum to a mass.”
― Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

“In the warped scenario, the field lines are equally distributed in all the directions on the brane. However, off the brane the field lines bend back around so that they become essentially parallel to the brane, almost as if the fifth dimension were finite. Even with an infinite dimension, the gravitational field is localized near the brane, and field lines spread essentially as if there were only four (spacetime) dimensions.”
― Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

“Ordinary matter’s interaction with electromagnetic radiation is responsible for this collapse. An important distinction between ordinary matter and dark matter is that ordinary matter can radiate.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Given that they’ve never seen (or felt or smelled) it, many people I’ve spoken to are surprised at the existence of dark matter and find it quite mysterious—or even wonder if it’s some sort of mistake. People ask how it can possibly be that most matter—about five times the amount of ordinary matter—cannot be detected with conventional telescopes. Personally, I would expect quite the opposite (though admittedly not everyone sees it this way). It would be even more mysterious to me if the matter we can see with our eyes is all the matter that exists. Why should we have perfect senses that can directly perceive everything? The big lesson of physics over the centuries is how much is hidden from our view. From this perspective, the question is really why the stuff we do know about should constitute as much of the energy density of the Universe as it does.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Even if we know the basic ingredients, in a multiverse populated by more than one brane, exotic new scenarios for the geometry of space are conceivable as well as myriad possibilities for how the particles we know and don’t know are distributed among them.”
― Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

“However, you will need to know about flavors and generations because of the strong constraints on the particles’ properties, which give us vital clues and constraints on the physics that lies beyond the Standard Model. Chief among these constraints is that different flavors of quarks and leptons with the same charges rarely, if ever, turn into one another.”
― Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

“So, in a sense, looking under the lamppost for dark matter is appropriate.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

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

“it was not scientists, but a reporter—Carlos Byars of the Houston Chronicle—who first made the connection. After listening to Hildebrand present the Arizona group’s research at a scientific meeting, Byars told him about Penfield’s earlier discovery of a potential impact crater—helping the scientists bring the mystery of the missing crater to its remarkably satisfying conclusion.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Nothing about our world is inconsistent with the existence of a multiverse.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“The goal of particle physics is to discover matter’s most basic constituents and the most fundamental physical laws obeyed by those constituents.”
― Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

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