Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The goal of particle physics is to discover matter's most basic constituents and the most fundamental physical laws obeyed by those constituents.

How can a four-dimensional and a five-(or ten-)dimensional theory have the same physical implications? What is the analog of an object traveling through the fifth dimension, for example? The answer is that an object moving through the fifth dimension would appear in the dual four-dimensional theory as an object that grows or shrinks.

In a supersymmetric universe, the partners of quarks and leptons would be new bosons. Physicists, who enjoy whimsical (but systematic) nomenclature, call them squarks and sleptons.

That's what's "special" in special relativity: the "special" inertial frames are only a small subset of all possible reference frames.

If an extra dimension is rolled up into a circle, the mass of the lightest such particle would differ from the electron's mass by an amount inversely proportional to the extra dimension's size. That means that, the larger the extra dimension, the smaller the particle's mass.

They tell us remarkable things, such as that extra dimensions can be infinite in size yet remain unseen, or that we can be living in a three-spatial-dimensional sinkhole in a higher-dimensional universe.

Spacetime can be so warped that the gravitational field becomes highly concentrated in a small region near a brane—so concentrated that the huge expanse of an infinite dimension is inconsequential.

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.

If large extra dimensions solve the hierarchy problem, higher-dimensional gravity would become strong at about a TeV.

But speculation is the only way to make progress in our understanding.

When a species can't adapt or relocate to a suitable habitat, it doesn't stand a chance. In our rapidly changing environment, people would do well to take this into consideration. Technological advances notwithstanding, the lesson is probably relevant when evaluating the likely geopolitical implications of today's changing environment.

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

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.

The warp factor is a function that changes the overall scale for position, time, mass, and energy at each point in the fifth dimension.

see it. Dinosaurs, on the other hand . . . I doubt I need to explain dinosaurs. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates from 231 to 66 million years ago. Though both dark matter and dinosaurs are independently fascinating, you might reasonably assume that this unseen physical substance and this popular biological icon are entirely unrelated. And this might well be the case. But the Universe is by definition a single entity and in principle its components interact.