Top 35 Lisa Randall Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 would say it’s important for scientists to speak out when they can and when they can be listened to.

There are women for whom family is a priority, and they do it. It just wasn’t as much a priority for me.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I considered going into business or becoming a lawyer – not for the money, but for the thrill of problem-solving.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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 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.