Professor
Lisa
Randall
Harvard University
Lisa Randall is Professor of Physics at Harvard University. Her work has been featured in Time magazine, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, the Economist, the New Scientist, Science, Nature, and elsewhere. Fellow scientists have cited her research more often than that of any other theoretical high-energy physicist in recent years, she was the first tenured woman in the Princeton physics department and the first tenured woman theorist at M.I.T. and Harvard. When not solving the problems of the universe, she can often be found rock climbing, hiking, or skiing. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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STUDY GUIDE
Knocking on Heaven’s Door is an exhilarating and accessible overview of these developments, and a rousing defense of the role of science in our lives.
There could be no better guide than Lisa Randall: named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” in the world, the bestselling author of Warped Passages is an expert on both particle physics (the study of the smallest objects we know of) and cosmology (the study of the largest).
In Knocking on Heaven’s Door, she explores how we decide which scientific questions to study and how we go about answering them; she examines the role of risk, creativity, uncertainty, beauty, and truth in scientific thinking through provocative conversations with leading figures in other fields (such as the chef David Chang, the forecaster Nate Silver, and the screenwriter Scott Derrickson); and she explains with wit and clarity the latest ideas in physics and cosmology, including the aims of the biggest and most expensive machine ever built: the Large Hadron Collider, the enormous collider below the border of France and Switzerland. Nearly 27 kilometers in circumference, it has within it both the hottest spot in the galaxy and the coldest, and features the most powerful supercomputer system in the world.
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