How a Physicist Sees the Universe: Messy and Sublime | Wired Science | Wired.com

How a Physicist Sees the Universe: Messy and Sublime | Wired Science | Wired.com
Excerpt:
Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall thinks about many things. Not just particle physics and cosmology, which are her forte, but also about the process of science, the nature of risk and uncertainty and even the approach that art and religion take to understanding the world.
In her latest book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, Randall writes about some of the most important scientific quests of today: the search for the Higgs boson, unraveling the mystery of dark matter and dark energy, and the possibility of discovering new physics at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Expanding beyond this scope, though, she also presents a scientist's take on topics ranging from the recent financial crisis to the role of asymmetry in art.
Wired recently sat down with Randall to talk about her view of the universe.

Wired: Your book seems to be mainly about two things: the current state of particle physics and the process of science. Why did you choose to write on these two topics together?
Lisa Randall: Firstly, I didn’t want to just do what I had done in my previous book, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions; I wanted to do something interesting that was different.
So really the seed for the book was to go into this idea of the nature of science. I think it’s an interesting story just how science is done, and I think that process tends to get oversimplified and overstated a lot of the time.
Having decided to do that, I thought I should round it with actual science. So I also write about the current state of particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider. People can get so caught up in thinking, you know, this is all so abstract but I think it’s important to understand that there are concrete testable results...