Electric polarizability measures the ability of the electric field to
deform a particle. Experimentally, the electric and magnetic
polarizabilities can be measured in Compton scattering experiments.
To compute these quantities theoretically we need to understand the
internal structure of the scatterer. For hadrons - bound stated of
quarks and gluons - this is a very difficult problem since their
internal structure cannot be parametrized easily. While quantum
chromodynamics describes accurately the interactions between quarks
and gluons, direct computations of hadron properties in terms of the
quark degrees of freedom are very challenging. In this talk I will show
how to use lattice QCD to extract the electric polarizability of hadrons,
outlining both the theoretical and computational challenges we must
overcome to arrive at the final answer.