Seth Lloyd Quotes

There are physicists, and there are string theorists. Of course the string theorists are physicists, but the string theorists in general will not attend lectures on experimental physics. They will not be terribly concerned about the results of experiments. They will talk to one another.

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.

The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.

Physics as we know it will be over in six months.

There is now a feeling that the pieces of physics are falling into place, not because of any single revolutionary idea or because of the efforts of any one physicist, but because of a flowering of many seeds of theory, most of them planted long ago.

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.

I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

I'd say many features of string theory don't mesh with what we observe in everyday life.

I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn't be found.

String theory has had a long and wonderful history. It originated as a technique to try to understand the strong force. It was a calculational mechanism, a way of approaching a mathematical problem that was too difficult, and it was a promising way, but it was only a technique. It was a mathematical technique rather than a theory in itself.

The problem is that modern fundamental physics is so far from you and me. The mathematics has become so much more complicated that you need at least 10 years to understand it. Fundamental physics has advanced so far from the understanding of most people that there is really a big disconnect.

We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature. The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.

I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.

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.

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.

One very important aspect of string theory is definitely testable. That was the prediction of supersymmetry, which emerged from string theory in the early '70s.

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.

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 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 ...

What lots of people have been trying to do ever since is find what's beyond the current Standard Model. So far, it has stood impervious to all attacks.

As accelerators reach higher and higher energies, we may need a new Standard Model, or, at least, today's may need to be modified, but that's the way science operates.

Theorists can create all sorts of theories which go beyond the Standard Model. But there's not one bit of experimental evidence to point out which way you should go.