Lisa Randall
Academy of Achievement
The first female theoretical physicist to gain tenure at Harvard, Lisa Randall is the proponent of a radical new cosmology that may overturn our old conceptions of time, space and the universe. The Standard Model of physics has proved highly accurate in predicting the relative strength of the known forces in verifiable ways, with one exception. The force of gravity appears inexplicably weak in relation to the other forces, such as electromagnetism. When a small magnet picks up a paper clip, it is overcoming the gravitational pull of the entire planet beneath it. After performing a mind-boggling series of calculations, Randall has proposed a solution to this riddle. She has come to suspect that there's a lot more gravity in the universe, but most of it is concentrated in a dimension that is hidden from us, one in which completely different rules govern the behavior of the elements. Randall suggests that our picture of the universe is distorted because we live in "a three-dimensional sin