I often get into debates with my boyfriend about "Great People." We both can agree on who we think are great people. For example, we both agree that Benjamin Franklin was great, Karl Marx was great, Sigmund Freud was great, Bill Gates is great, Marie Curie was great, Harriet Tubman was great, Rosa Parks was great, Watson and Crick were great. But we disagree about what it takes to be great.
My theory about greatness:
Being great is determined by something far greater than the individual who is. You are born great and that's it You show signs of greatness at an early age . Greatness is not something that you can acquire over the period of your life. Sure, you can educate yourself, advance yourself, pull yourself up and out, make tons of money, or even be popular, but unless greatness shows up in your DNA, your life will most likely only impact yourself and a neighborhood of people around you. For those who are great: Your ideas are original and forward moving. You often find yourself at the right place at the right time. You are not defined by what you wear, where you went to school, what you look like, what you studied--sure they can enhance you but they in no way define you. You are defined by your cereberal cortex. When you walk, we follow, when you speak, we listen.
Now, an overwhelming number of us are not great. But, there are many non great people who do amazing things--it does not mean that your life is void of course....
So, having said that, I think that Lisa Randall is great. I pulled a little info about her from a www.colorado.edu website. Here's her brief bio:
Renowned Harvard University Professor Lisa Randall, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists and cosmologists, will speak at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Monday, March 19, on hidden dimensions of the universe.
A professor of theoretical physics at Harvard, Randall will speak at 7:30 p.m. in Macky Auditorium for the 42nd George Gamow Memorial Lecture. The talk will focus on concepts from her 2005 book, "Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions" and is free and open to the public.
Randall's research focuses on elementary particles and fundamental forces and has involved the study of a wide variety of physics models, including extra dimensions of space. Published by HarperCollins, "Warped Passages" was cited by the New York Times as one of the 100 most notable books of 2005.
Randall will talk about concepts including relativity, string theory and cosmological inflation and will address several questions during the talk, including why people could be living in a three-dimensional universe floating in a four-dimensional space. She will explore the possibility that an invisible universe exists only fractions of an inch from the known universe in another dimension, which could explain phenomena seen in the known world, according to Randall.
Randall has authored or co-authored more than 100 publications and in 2004 was recognized as the most cited theoretical physicist in the world during the previous five years. She was featured in Newsweek's annual "Who's Next" issue in 2006, predicting top newsmakers in politics, business, science and the arts and was called "one of the most promising theoretical physicists of her generation" by the news magazine.
Upcoming physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator slated to open near Geneva later this year, are expected to answer questions about possible warped, extra dimensions that may exist, she said. Physicists will be looking for evidence of particular types of tiny particles associated with hidden dimensions that may be revealed by smashing protons together in the collider, which is contained in an underground, 17-mile-circumference tunnel.
Randall is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Physical Society and is a past winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. She also is a past winner of a National Science Foundation Young Investigator award, a U.S. Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator Award and the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
Her research has been featured in such places as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the New Yorker, the BBC, PBS, the Dallas Morning News, Discover Magazine and Der Spiegel.
Randall earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1987 and was a faculty member at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before returning to Harvard as a professor in 2001.
She's great not because of all of her fantastic degrees. She's not great because she's a woman in a male-dominated field. She's not great because she was just named one of Vogue Magazine's Best Dressed. These things, of course, make her amazing but she's great simply because her life purpose is to advance the boundaries of mankind in a way that will potentially affect every single one of us.
