Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [208]
—CARLTON CUSE, award-winning producer and writer of Lost
“Science has a battle for hearts and minds on its hands: a battle on two fronts—against superstition and ignorance on one flank, and against pseudo-intellectual obscurantism on the other. How good it feels to have Lisa Randall’s unusual blend of topflight science, clarity, and charm on our side.”
—RICHARD DAWKINS, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion
“A deep and deeply wonderful explanation of how science—and the rest of the known universe—actually works.”
—DANIEL GILBERT, author of Stumbling on Happiness
“Lisa Randall’s focus on the essential relationship between technology and scientific thinking prompts fascinating debate, and this is a great primer for those nonscientists who are trying to figure out the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider.”
—ELON MUSK, CEO/CTO of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla Motors, and co-founder of PayPal
“Many books call to mind superlatives, but this one has them all. It explains the greatest scientific endeavor in history—one that is exploring the earliest, smallest, largest, and most powerful phenomena in the universe, and that may answer the deepest questions about the nature of physical reality. Lisa Randall’s lucid explanations of concepts at the frontiers of physics—including her own dazzling ideas—are highly illuminating, and her hearty defense of reason and science is a welcome contribution to the contemporary world of ideas. Read this book today to understand the science of tomorrow.”
—STEVEN PINKER, author of How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought
“Lisa Randall is the rarest rarity—a theoretical physics genius who can write and talk to the rest of us in ways we both understand and enjoy. This book takes nonspecialists as close as they’ll ever get to the inner workings of the cosmos.”
—LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS, former treasury secretary
“Lisa Randall does a great job of explaining to the nonphysicist the basic science approaches of modern physics and what the latest experiments might reveal. This is a must-read to appreciate what is coming in our future.”
—J. CRAIG VENTER, sequencer of the human genome and developer of the first synthetic life
OTHER WORKS
Warped Passages
CREDITS
Jacket and cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph: Carter Dow Photography
COPYRIGHT
KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR. Copyright © 2011 by Lisa Randall.
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“Come Together” © 1969 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administerd by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
“Jet Song” by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright © 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 by Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright renewed. Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, publisher. Boosey & Hawkes, agent for rental. International copyright secured. Reprinted by Permission.
Every attempt has been made to contact copyright holders. The author and publisher will be happy to make good in future printings any errors or omissions.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Randall, Lisa.
Knocking on heaven’s door : how physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world / Lisa Randall.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: “From the one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the