Lisa Randall

“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.”

“You have principles. You test them as accurately as you can. Eventually, they might break down.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Harvard freshmen are smart, interested, and excited, and it's fun hearing their different perspectives and stuff that they will share.”

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

“Physicists have yet to understand why the Higgs boson's mass is what it is.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Most physicists like myself won't believe the result until every possible caveat has been investigated and/or the result is confirmed elsewhere.”

“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.”

“I started out working on supersymmetry. The theory predicts that for every particle we know about, there will be an additional particle.”