Knocking on Heaven's Door by Lisa Randall
How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World

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Synopsis

Trade Paperback "Lisa Randall has written Knocking on Heaven's Door in the same witty, informal style with which she explains physics in person, making complex ideas fascinating and easy to understand. Her book presents the latest physics developments with excursions into culture and public policy, explaining science in ways that just might make you think differently-and encourage you to make smarter decisions about the world."-President Bill Clinton "I... more

Trade Paperback "Lisa Randall has written Knocking on Heaven's Door in the same witty, informal style with which she explains physics in person, making complex ideas fascinating and easy to understand. Her book presents the latest physics developments with excursions into culture and public policy, explaining science in ways that just might make you think differently-and encourage you to make smarter decisions about the world."-President Bill Clinton "I didn't think it was possible to write a complex, detailed look at the world of physics that the non-scientist could understand, but then Lisa Randall wrote this amazing, insightful, and engaging book and proved me wrong." -Carlton Cuse, award-winning producer and writer of Lost "The general reader's indispensable passport to the frontiers of science."-Booklist, starred review One of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world and the bestselling author of Warped Passages, Lisa Randall is an expert in 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 takes us on an amazing tour through the latest developments in physics-from the edge of the universe to elementary particles, black holes to dark matter. Randall explains how scientists decide which questions to study, how these questions are answered, and how the knowledge we gain has the potential to radically revise our understanding of the world and the universe. She examines the role of risk, creativity, uncertainty, beauty, and truth in scientific thinking through provocative conversations with leading figures in other fields, including chef David Chang, forecaster Nate Silver, and screenwriter Scott Derrickson. She also explains the latest ideas in physics and cosmology, focusing on the Large Hadron Collider, the enormous particle accelerator below the border of France and Switzerland, which promises to shed light on the origin of matter. An impassioned argument in defense of science, Knocking on Heaven's Door "explores some of the biggest ideas in contemporary physics and how they undergird such everyday matters as risk assessment, logic and even our understanding of beauty." (Time magazine) less

About Lisa Randall

Lisa Randall studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University, where she is Frank J. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science. Her work has... more

Lisa Randall studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University, where she is Frank J. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science. Her work has made her among the most cited and influential theoretical physicists today, and has been featured in Discover, The Economist, Newsweek, Scientific American, and many top-ranked scientific journals. She has been one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" and Rolling Stone's "RS100: Agents of Change," and her first book, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, was named a New York Times Notable Book. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. When not solving the problems of the universe, Randall can be found rock climbing, skiing, or contributing to art-science connections. Her libretto for Hypermusic Prologue premiered at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2009. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. less