Press About Lisa Randall

The New York Times, “On Gravity, Oreos and a Theory of Everything”
The portal to the fifth dimension, sadly, is closed. There used to be an ice cream parlor in the student center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And it was there, in the summer of 1998, that Lisa Randall, now a professor of physics at Harvard and a bit of a chocoholic, and Raman Sundrum, a professor at Johns Hopkins, took an imaginary trip right out of this earthly plane into a science fiction realm of parallel universes, warped space and otherworldly laws of physics.

They came back with a possible answer to a question that has tormented scientists for decades, namely why gravity is so weak compared with the other forces of nature: in effect, we are borrowing it from another universe. In so doing, Dr. Randall and Dr. Sundrum helped foment a revolution in the way scientists think about string theory — the vaunted “theory of everything” — raising a glimmer of hope that coming experiments may actually test some of its ineffable sounding concepts. Their work undermined well-worn concepts like the idea that we can even know how many dimensions of space we live in, or the reality of gravity, space and time. (full text)

Newsweek: Who's Next 2006, Physics: Lisa Randall
“Until now, string theory has been an entirely abstract, mathematical construct, but the new supercollider may change all that, and if so — if, for example, it shows evidence of particles that travel in, or through, those extra dimensions — it will represent the first great theoretical breakthrough of the 21st century, blazing a path for physics the way relativity did a century ago.” (full text)

The Boston Globe, “Across the Universe”
Whatever your manner of repose while reading this article — sitting, standing, lying down — you most likely feel firmly anchored to the earth. The force of gravity, as you experience it, seems impressively strong. That is not exactly how Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard, views the matter. Like many other scientists, Randall thinks of gravity as a profoundly weak thing — “feeble,” as she puts it. Indeed, particle for particle, as it were, gravity is the puniest of the fundamental forces governing the activity of matter in the universe, by a staggering margin. (full text)