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1 " Despite my resistance to hyperbole, the LHC belongs to a world that can only be described with superlatives. It is not merely large: the LHC is the biggest machine ever built. It is not merely cold: the 1.9 kelvin (1.9 degrees Celsius above absolute zero) temperature necessary for the LHC’s supercomputing magnets to operate is the coldest extended region that we know of in the universe—even colder than outer space. The magnetic field is not merely big: the superconducting dipole magnets generating a magnetic field more than 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s are the strongest magnets in industrial production ever made.And the extremes don’t end there. The vacuum inside the proton-containing tubes, a 10 trillionth of an atmosphere, is the most complete vacuum over the largest region ever produced. The energy of the collisions are the highest ever generated on Earth, allowing us to study the interactions that occurred in the early universe the furthest back in time. "
― Lisa Randall , Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World
2 " Lots of data gets collected through the latest technology today, and not all of it is about people's consumer preferences. "
― Lisa Randall , Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe
3 " The particle’s discovery is tremendously exciting. It’s also inspirational. Let’s just enjoy that for now. "
― Lisa Randall , Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space
4 " [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. "
5 " We often fail to notice things that we are not expecting. "
6 " 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. "
7 " 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. "
8 " 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. "
9 " 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 "
10 " 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. "
11 " The goal of particle physics is to discover matter’s most basic constituents and the most fundamental physical laws obeyed by those constituents. "
― Lisa Randall , Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions
12 " Although we might experience the illusion of a self-contained environment, every day at sunrise and every night when the Moon and the far more distant stars come into view, we are reminded that our planet is not alone. Stars and nebulae are further evidence that we exist in a galaxy that resides within a far larger Universe. We orbit within a Solar System where the seasons remind us further of our orientation and placement within it. Our very measurement of time in terms of days and years signifies the relevance of our surroundings. "
13 " The uncertainty principle tells us that it would take infinitely long to measure energy (or mass) with infinite precision, and that the longer a particle lasts, the more accurate our measurement of its energy can be. But if the particle is short-lived and its energy cannot possibly be determined with infinite precision, the energy can temporarily deviate from that of a true long-lived particle. In fact, because of the uncertainty principle, particles will do whatever they can get away with for as long as they can. "
14 " 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. "
15 " 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. "
16 " That’s what’s “special” in special relativity: the “special” inertial frames are only a small subset of all possible reference frames. "
17 " 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. "
18 " 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. "
19 " 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. "
20 " 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. "
