Lisa Randall is the first female tenured theoretical physicist at Harvard University. This alone would probably be enough to raise the interest of most science journalists who are all too often confronted with the endless search for a female face who would look good in their newspapers, and make science somehow more human to non-scientific readers. Search her name in Google and read articles about her, then read her most recent book, and you realize that she is also one of the small band of physicists who can write popular science books. Then meet her, as I did at CERN, and you discover a no-nonsense person who finds it "normal" to deal with extra-dimensions and parallel universes, as well as hidden gravitons and quantum gravity.rnRandall has visited CERN many times, stayingforseveral months in 1992 to 1993, when she worked on B physics and also on ideas in supersymmetry and supersymmetry breaking. These ideas have since evolved, and she is now one of the world's experts in the theory of extra dimensions, one of the solutions proposed forthe puzzling question of quantum gravity. According to these theories, our universe could have extra dimensions beyond the four that we experience-three of space and one of time.
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