Leon M. Lederman Quotes

When the violation of parity was discovered I began a series of electronic experiments to investigate parity violation in hyperon decays.

In England and the United States, where physicists have at their disposal equipment of very high voltages, several new elements were prepared using protons and deuterons as projectiles.

Janet Landis came to work in my group in the summer of 1957 when our first bubble-chamber was churning out its earliest pictures.

I turned my attention for a while to gamma ray astronomy and soon began the first in a continous series of experiments at the Savannah River site to study the properties of the neutrino.

So when you ask me how string theory might be tested, I can tell you what's likely to happen at accelerators or some parts of the theory that are likely to be tested.

I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.

That name was a kind of joke, and not a very good one. An author, Leon Lederman, wanted to call it 'that goddamn particle' because it was clear it was going to be a tough job finding it experimentally. His editor wouldn't have that, and he said 'okay, call it the God particle', and the editor accepted it. I don't think he should've have done, because it's so misleading.

My background is in theoretical physics, and it's something very close to my heart.

Simultaneous recording with superimposed ionization chambers and Wilson chambers, ionization chambers and sets of counting tubes, has not yet been carried out.

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.

In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there.

I had imagined doing nuclear physics and cosmic ray work in greater style in peace time. To do modern physics in a small way is of no use of all.

A neutrino comes into a detector, and most of the time, you don't see it. But very, very seldom, it will satisfy your curiosity and interact.

I always wanted to be an experimental physicist and was attracted to the idea of using continuing advances in technology to carry out fundamental science experiments that could not be done otherwise.

In a sense, the searches for both magnetic monopoles and gravity waves are very similar. But, theoretically, gravity waves are more solid.

As for me, I want to have fun while I'm working. Now not everyone thinks physics is fun, but I do. I think experimental physics is especially fun, because not only do you get to solve puzzles about the universe or on Earth, there are really cool toys in the lab.

No-one really thought of fission before its discovery.

String theories, for instance, they require seven additional dimensions. So, as experimentalists we should, with our high-tech instruments like the Large Hadron Collider, just listen to nature and to what nature wants to tell us.

An electron is no more (and no less) hypothetical than a star. Nowadays we count electrons one by one in a Geiger counter, as we count the stars one by one on a photographic plate.

I thought I wanted to be a physicist in high school until I learned that there was much more math than philosophy in it. I assumed I would just sit around all day and think.

I did not set out to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. I'm a particle physicist, and I was actually thinking about dark matter along with some collaborators.

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

Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.

Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that - popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies - because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.

But a machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the Solar System - and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.