I wanted to meet the theoretical physicist Lisa Randall because of a novel I’m trying to write. My editor thought the problem was the main character, who was supposed to be a writer and a mother. To the editor, she didn’t seem like a very good writer, and she screamed at her children all the time; she was certainly a terrible mother.
“You mean the first-person narrator, called ‘N’?”
“I obviously don’t think you’re a bad mother or a bad writer,” my editor said. “Just the character.”
I gave the manuscript to a friend, who said that the problem was clear. “You’ve put everything negative about yourself into the character, and none of the good stuff. You have to find a way to admire her more.”
The way I found was to turn her into a physicist.
Over the course of the summer, I read all of Randall’s books. I thought of Randall as I drove my children down the sun-dappled roads of eastern Long Island. The first woman tenured in physics at Princeton and the first in theoretical physics at Harvard, Randall has—in her spare time—written three New York Times best-selling books about physics and the libretto for an opera based on one of her own mathematical models. She is often mentioned on shortlists of women who might win the Nobel Prize in Physics. (Only two women have won it since the prize was established, a hundred and fifteen years ago.) Our first conversations, over e-mail, were brief, because Randall was on a ten-day trip to Korea, Japan, Aspen, and Germany, where she accepted the Julius Wess Award. If I were Randall, I thought, I would be able to answer my children’s questions about the things they could see—trees and clouds and stars—in a way that would engender curiosity about the things they couldn’t: the nature of forces, the various paradoxes inherent in our understanding of quantum and cosmological scales. If I were Randall, I would be thinking about gravitational waves while eating room-service sushi in a hotel room in Tokyo.
I finally got Randall’s attention when I invited her to go surfing. I’ve taken a few lessons, but am far from a surfer. Based on the references in her books to rock climbing and skiing, though, it seemed like an activity she would like, and it’s possible that I overstated my ability in an effort to impress her.
Randall arrived in Montauk on a Tuesday night, and by the time I got to the beach on Wednesday morning she was already in the water. There was no choice but to join her. Although she claimed to be an “absolute beginner,” I saw her stand up on three waves in the short interval before I got too cold and had to get out. Randall, who is fifty-four, is blond and fine-featured, and seems younger than her age. She put a towel around my shoulders and kindly suggested that I was good at paddling.
“So,” I said, through chattering teeth. “Do you think about surfing differently than the average person—are you mapping equations for those waves in your head?”
“People always ask me that about skiing,” Randall said. “No.”
There are two main types of theoretical physicist: the string-theorist type, who begins with a hypothetical universe that has established rules—in which there are, say, ten dimensions—and the model-building type, who uses what we already know to propose new quantum field theories. Randall is more the second type, most famous for papers that proposed two models of “warped spacetime,” which she made with her fellow particle physicist Raman Sundrum, earlier in her career. They are now among the most cited papers in particle physics. The first model—really a bunch of mathematical equations—proposes a solution to the question of why gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental physical forces. (Randall explains the problem in her most recent book, “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs”: “After all, you can pick up a paper clip with a tiny magnet, successfully competing against the gravitational influence of the entire Earth.”)
Randall’s work also deals with the topics of supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and, most recently, dark matter—an invisible material that was responsible for the formation of galaxies in the early universe and might also affect the solar system’s current trajectory. Randall and her colleagues suggested that the charged nature of some dark matter might have caused it to collapse into a disk, which now lies inside our own disk-shaped Milky Way galaxy. A Harvard colleague suggested a catchy name for this: “double-disk dark matter.” Randall suggests that D.D.D.M. may have attracted the enormous comet that hit Earth sixty-six million years ago, annihilating the dinosaurs and seventy-five per cent of the other terrestrial species. Whereas ordinary matter makes up only five per cent of the universe’s energy, dark matter contributes twenty-five per cent; the remainder is a mysterious entity called “dark energy.”
In an earlier book about particle physics, Randall wrote, “The big lesson of physics is what is hidden from our view.” As I talked to Randall on the beach, it struck me that building a model might bear some resemblance to writing a novel. In both, you rearrange elements of the familiar world to create a potential scenario that may tell you something new about that reality. Everyone who reads George Eliot’s masterpiece “Middlemarch” takes something different from it; the paragraph I go back to describes the moment when Dorothea recognizes the mistake she has made in marrying the elderly, pedantic Casaubon:
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.
Until I read that the first time, I couldn’t put into words why I wanted to become a writer. Peculiar combinations of words—keen, squirrel, wadded—might refer to real things that had never before been described. Reading it again recently, I thought that the same might be said of the equations that physicists use to describe the world around us, and also that there might be something preferable for someone as quick as Randall in turning off that part of her brain some of the time.
Randall grew up in Fresh Meadows, Queens, the second of three daughters, the first of whom had an undiagnosed disability, as well as the prodigious memory sometimes associated with Asperger’s syndrome. (Randall herself related to the Tom Cruise character in the movie “Rain Man,” and thought that his performance was underrated.) She and her younger sister, now a computer-science professor at Georgia Tech, both went to Stuyvesant, the specialized math-and-science high school in Manhattan. Randall describes fighting with her mother for permission to leave the house before it was light, in order to attend early-morning meetings of the math team, of which she was the first female captain. At seventeen, she won first place in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, for a project on perfect Gaussian integers, a type of complex number.
When I asked Randall whether she felt there was a connection between her work and her older sister’s disability, Randall responded by e-mail, “It might be part of the reason I was so serious and retreated. Feeling responsible for talents I had if that makes sense.” She also remembered that for a period, around the time when she was five, she stopped speaking entirely. When a friend of her parents’—her father was a salesman for an engineering firm, her mother a third-grade teacher—suggested that this was strange, given her intelligence, her mother replied that she was just trying to get attention. Randall interprets it differently: “I think I only wanted to say things that were true.”
As an adult, Randall seems like someone who both wants attention and wants to say things that are true. You get the feeling that she might not always be easy to work with—she mentioned an argument with colleagues over a noisy coffee machine—but she is extremely patient in explaining her work to an interested party whose physics education never went beyond ninth-grade physical science. Her books rarely gloss over an explanation when it’s possible to supply it. “I wish this were less complicated, but I’m giving you the real story here,” she writes in her 2012 e-book about the search for the Higgs boson—a subatomic particle that is one of the most important discoveries of twenty-first-century physics so far.
Randall says that she writes for a general audience because it helps her connect with people in other fields, who suggest ideas she might not have considered. The novelist Cormac McCarthy was so interested in her work that he offered to edit her first book. What’s striking about Randall’s writing is its urgency, perhaps because of the way she feels about science, which she has described as analogous to religion; physics, she writes, “offers anyone some perspective when dealing with the foolishness of everyday life.”
Much of what theoretical physicists do is pure mathematics, so they often need analogies to explain their work to laypeople. While this might be a chore for some physicists, Randall clearly delights in it. Observing dark matter, she suggests, is like spotting a famous person: “Even if you don’t see George Clooney directly, the disruptive traffic generated by the waiting crowd armed with cell phones and cameras suffices to alert you to a celebrity’s proximity.” In the case of dark matter, it is the transparent stuff’s gravitational influence on ordinary matter that lets scientists know it’s there.
Making a plan with Randall is almost as difficult as (I imagine) it might be with Clooney, and every one of our meetings was scheduled and rescheduled several times. Randall is not only very busy but also has trouble deciding what she wants to do, as well as a habit of second-guessing those decisions. The first time I met her, she had interrupted a climbing trip to Devils Tower, in Wyoming, in order to attend a book festival in East Hampton—a decision she questioned after listening to the author of a book on entertaining speak about jumping out of a cake at a black-tie birthday party, in Dallas. The night after we went surfing, when I suggested we do something more in line with Randall’s vocation—I thought we could meet on the beach to look at the Milky Way—we texted for an hour to decide whether the sky was clear enough to see anything. I was a half-hour drive from where Randall was staying on the beach, and by the time I got there it was cloudy.
“If only you’d come an hour ago,” she said. I followed her down the nearly deserted surfing beach anyway. Randall walks in a determined, forward-tilting lope, somewhat self-consciously, as if walking in public were an unavoidable evil she would like to dispense with as quickly as possible. On the beach, two bonfires were burning, and for a moment a car in the parking lot illuminated a section of the water when its brights were turned on. Otherwise, the beach was dark, and you had to be careful not to fall in the holes that children had dug earlier in the day.
We sat on the sand and looked at the sky. Randall tried to show me a satellite through a gap in the clouds, but when I pointed she told me that what I was looking at was a plane. I asked her if, when she looked up there, she saw something different than what the average person would see; to me, I said, it always looks like a black sheet with holes poked in it.
“That’s what it looks like,” Randall agreed. “Most of the time we all behave as if what’s here on Earth is all there is.”
Randall told me that sometimes a model works, “but it’s not something that’s compelling. Yes, things could happen like that, but I don’t believe it. And sometimes it’s like, wow—this happened automatically. . . . Sometimes a model is like that—it has a life of its own.” I thought of the way that a fiction writer will sometimes say that the character has taken over her pen, a notion that has always struck me as overblown. But there is the sense that, in writing about a hypothetical situation, you sometimes forget yourself enough to put down something you might not otherwise have admitted—in other words, to say something true. I had misquoted Lorrie Moore during our conversation, and so, the next day, I e-mailed Randall her famous definition of fiction: “It’s the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science.” Randall was skeptical, and fired back a caveat: “Theoretical physics IS science. We are not just making stuff up. We are hypothesizing what might be true but we don’t yet know if it is. We look for ways to find evidence (or rule it out).”
In my newfound enthusiasm for particle physics, I tried to interest my mother in watching a Times video about the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. “I’d love to watch it,” my mother said, “but I won’t understand it.” When I told Randall what my mother had said, she said that as long as it was socially acceptable for women to be intimidated by physics, it would be hard to change the discipline’s gender discrepancy. (As recently as 2010, women made up only fourteen per cent of American physics faculty.) “As long as it’s like, ‘Yeah, she can do this stuff, but she’s so weird.’ And of course we are weird. You’re not going to become a theoretical physicist, especially as a woman, and not be weird.” Randall pointed to Stephen Hawking and the way the popular notion of physicists as extraordinary sometimes allows the rest of us to give the whole discipline a pass: “To the extent that they can make you into the other, it makes people feel more comfortable.”
We were sitting on the porch of the cottage where she was staying. Seagulls complained in the background. Randall got up once to speculate about the workings of a recreational biplane, like something the Wright brothers might have flown. I got up once to help her with the controls on her host’s washing machine. Then we walked down to the beach one last time, where we ran into my kids climbing a lifeguard chair. Randall immediately scrambled up after them, concerned that they might fall. I hesitated, weighing a potential trip to the emergency room against the photo opportunity—the chance that I might someday be able to say, “There’s you with the Nobel laureate in physics!” The three of them reached the top. You could see only sky behind their heads. I stayed on the ground and took a picture.