Lisa Randall Quotes

We had to understand things like why the top quark was so heavy and the electron is so light. The Higgs is a big, important step.

The top quark was discovered in 1995, and since then, the Higgs has become our obsession because the standard model was incomplete without it.

As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore.

I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology.

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.

Among the questions we have in mind: dark matter, antimatter, and matter symmetry.

I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn't be found.

I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.

With the discovery of the Higgs boson, one of the questions has been ticked off the list, but there are many others. We hope that we can find answers or hints for answers to at least some of them. But of course, this is in the hands of nature.

There are physicists, and there are string theorists. Of course the string theorists are physicists, but the string theorists in general will not attend lectures on experimental physics. They will not be terribly concerned about the results of experiments. They will talk to one another.

We know that if supersymmetric particles exist, they must be very heavy; otherwise we would have spotted them by now.

You have that one basic string, but it can vibrate in many ways. But we're trying to get a lot of particles because experimental physicists have discovered a lot of particles.

So when you ask me how string theory might be tested, I can tell you what's likely to happen at accelerators or some parts of the theory that are likely to be tested.

Theorists can create all sorts of theories which go beyond the Standard Model. But there's not one bit of experimental evidence to point out which way you should go.

To me, the most exciting thing about the discovery of the Higgs particle is that its existence was predicted fifty years before its discovery through experiment.

I had been interested in particle physics, which deals with the fundamental constituents of matter.

I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

I'd say many features of string theory don't mesh with what we observe in everyday life.

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.

String theory has had a long and wonderful history. It originated as a technique to try to understand the strong force. It was a calculational mechanism, a way of approaching a mathematical problem that was too difficult, and it was a promising way, but it was only a technique. It was a mathematical technique rather than a theory in itself.

We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature. The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.

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?

I had more or less abandoned the idea of an electroweak gauge theory during the period 1961-1970. Of the several reasons for this, one was the failure of my naive foray into renormalizability.

In 1956, when I began doing theoretical physics, the study of elementary particles was like a patchwork quilt. Electrodynamics, weak interactions, and strong interactions were clearly separate disciplines, separately taught and separately studied. There was no coherent theory that described them all.