Lisa randall awards
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I wanted to meet the theoretical physicist Lisa Randall because of a novel I’m trying to write. My editor thought the problem was the main character, who was supposed to be a writer and a mother. To the editor, she didn’t seem like a very good writer, and she screamed at her children all the time; she was certainly a terrible mother.
“You mean the first-person narrator, called ‘N’?”
“I obviously don’t think you’re a bad mother or a bad writer,” my editor said. “Just the character.”
I gave the manuscript to a friend, who said that the problem was clear. “You’ve put everything negative about yourself into the character, and none of the good stuff. You have to find a way to admire her more.”
The way I found was to turn her into a physicist.
Over the course of the summer, I read all of Randall’s books. I thought of Randall as I drove my children down the sun-dappled roads of eastern Long Island. The first woman tenured in physics at Princeton and the first in theoretical physics at Harvard, Randall has—in her spare time—written three New York Times best-selling books about phys
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Lisa Randall
American theoretical physicist
Lisa RandallHonFInstP (born June 18, 1962) is an American theoretical physicist and Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University.[1] Her research includes the fundamental forces of nature and dimensions of space. She studies the Standard Model, supersymmetry, possible solutions to the hierarchy problem concerning the relative weakness of gravity, cosmology of dimensions, baryogenesis, cosmological inflation, and dark matter.[2] She contributed to the Randall–Sundrum model, first published in 1999 with Raman Sundrum.[3]
Early life and education
Randall was born in Queens, New York City, New York.[4] She graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1980,[5] where she was a classmate of fellow physicist and science popularizer Brian Greene.[6] She won first place in the 1980 Westinghouse Science Talent Search at the age of 18 and was also named a National Merit Scholar. She attended Harvard University, where she took Math 55,[7] earned a BA i
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Professor Lisa Randall studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University. Her research connects theoretical insights to puzzles in our current understanding of the properties and interactions of matter. She has developed and studied a wide variety of models to address these questions, the most prominent involving extra dimensions of space. Her work has involved improving our under-standing of the Standard Model of particle physics, supersymmetry, baryogenesis, cosmological inflation, and dark matter. Randall’s research also explores ways to experimentally test and verify ideas and her current research focuses in large part on the Large Hadron Collider and dark matter searches and models.
Randall has also had a public presence through her writing, lectures, and radio and TV appearances. Randall’s books, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions and Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World were both on the New York Times’ list of 100 Nota
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