Quotes from Lisa Randall

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

By analogy, we know that if a hypersphere (a sphere with four spatial dimensions) were to pass through our universe, it would appear to us as a time sequence of three-dimensional spheres that increase, then decrease, in size.

For two events separated in time, a geodesic is the natural path things would take in spacetime to connect one event to the other.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Other branes might be parallel to ours and might house parallel worlds. But many other types of braneworld might exist too. Branes could intersect and particles could be trapped at the intersections. Branes could have different dimensionality. They could curve. They could move. They could wrap around unseen invisible dimensions. Let your imagination run wild and draw any picture you like. It is not impossible that such a geometry exists in the cosmos.

All of the lightest stable quarks and leptons have heavier replicas. No one knows why they are there, or what they are good for. When physicists first realized that the muon, a particle first seen in cosmic rays, was nothing other than a heavier version of the electron (200 times heavier), the physicist I.I. Rabi asked, "Who ordered that?

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.

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.

The Arizona team named the crater after an unfortunately hard-to-pronounce small nearby fishing harbor, Chicxulub Puerto, which is located above the center of the structure. The term, which is pronounced CHICK-shuh-lube, is sometimes translated as the devil's tail—appropriately enough for the imposing feature that Walter Alvarez dubbed the "crater of doom.