Leonard Susskind Quotes

I do theoretical particle physics. We're trying to understand the most basic structure of matter. And the way you do that is you have to look at really small distances. And to get to small distances, you need high energies.

The aim of particle physics is to understand what everything’s made of, and how everything sticks together. By everything I mean me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything.

In the lab, we could not see or physically describe the mathematical objects that we called quarks, which we suspected were the key to unlocking the dynamics of the strong force that binds together the clump of protons and neutrons at the center of the atom.

You have that one basic string, but it can vibrate in many ways. But we're trying to get a lot of particles because experimental physicists have discovered a lot of particles.

Particle physics suffers more from being infected by the socio-political mood of the day than from lack of spectacular opportunities for major and profound discoveries.

We had to understand things like why the top quark was so heavy and the electron is so light. The Higgs is a big, important step.

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.

Among the questions we have in mind: dark matter, antimatter, and matter symmetry.

When I was at Berkeley, the framework of quantum field theory could calculate the dynamics of electromagnetism. It could roughly describe the motion of the weak nuclear force, radiation. But it hit a brick wall with the strong interaction, the binding force.

Physicists are interested in measuring neutrino properties because they tell us about the structure of the Standard Model, the well-tested theory that describes matter's most basic elements and interactions.

We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is.

High-energy collisions have led to the observation of many hundreds of new hadronic particle states. These new particles, which are generally unstable, appear to be just as fundamental as the neutron and the proton.

With the discovery of the Higgs boson, one of the questions has been ticked off the list, but there are many others. We hope that we can find answers or hints for answers to at least some of them. But of course, this is in the hands of nature.

Physicists have yet to understand why the Higgs boson's mass is what it is.

What the string theorists do is arguably physics. It deals with the physical world. They're attempting to make a consistent theory that explains the interactions we see among particles and gravity as well. That's certainly physics, but it's a kind of physics that is not yet testable.

The top quark was discovered in 1995, and since then, the Higgs has become our obsession because the standard model was incomplete without it.

In 1956, when I began doing theoretical physics, the study of elementary particles was like a patchwork quilt. Electrodynamics, weak interactions, and strong interactions were clearly separate disciplines, separately taught and separately studied. There was no coherent theory that described them all.

While at Chicago my interest in the new field of particle physics was stimulated by a course given by Gell- Mann, who was developing his ideas about Strangeness at the time.

As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore.

I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.

Not only am I not persuaded by the testimony; I do not even understand it. For me the charm of quarks is well hidden ...

The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.

To me, the most exciting thing about the discovery of the Higgs particle is that its existence was predicted fifty years before its discovery through experiment.

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology.

There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions.