Lisa Randall: belief

Transcript context

…You’ve had an exceptional career. What advice would you give to young people, maybe high school, college, on how to have a career they can be proud of and a life they can be proud of? I think the weird thing about being a scientist or an academic in general is you have to believe really strongly what you do while questioning it all the time. That’s a hard balance to have. Sometimes it helps to collaborate with people, but to really believe that you could have good ideas at the same time, knowing they could all be wrong. That’s a tough tightrope to walk sometimes, but to really test them out. The other thing is sometimes if you get too far buried, you look out and you think there’s so much out there. Sometimes it’s just good to bring it back home and just think okay, can I have as good idea as the person next to me rather than the greatest physicist who ever lived? Right now, like you said, I think there’s lots of big issues out there, and it’s hard to balance that. Sometimes it’s hard to forget the role of physics, but I think Wilson said it really well when he said when they were building Fermilab, it was like this won’t defend the country, but it’ll make it worth defending. It’s just the idea that in all this chaos, it’s still important that we still make progress in these things. Sometimes when major world events are happening, it’s easy to forget that. I think those are important too. You don’t want to forget those, but to try to keep that balance because we don’t want to lose what it is that makes humans special. That’s the big picture. Do you also lose yourself in the simple joy of puzzle solving?…

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