Peter Higgs Quotes

The Cern laboratory in Geneva was set up in 1955 to bring together European scientists who wished to pursue research into the nuclear and sub-nuclear world. Physicists then had greater clout than other scientists because the memory of their role in the Second World War was fresh in people's minds.

My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we've had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.

The first interview I gave to the press was in 1987 when some people thought a previous machine at Cern, called LEP, might have enough energy to produce the particle.

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 had set out to disprove quantum field theory - and the opposite occurred! I was shocked.

Researchers probably never anticipated when they started smashing atoms and protons in our large accelerators that their science their very basic research on matter would eventually give us remarkable life-saving technology.

Why spend billions on a super collider, when we already have John Sununu?

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.

One day I went up to my mom and I said, 'Mom, can I have permission to build a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher - a betatron - in the garage?' And my mom stared at me, and she said, 'Sure. Why not? And don't forget to take out the garbage.'

In 1956 we observed the electron antineutrino.

It might seem paradoxical that the biggest scientific instruments of all are needed in order to probe the very smallest things in nature. The micro-world is inherently 'fuzzy' - the sharper the detail we wish to study, the higher the energy that is required and the bigger the accelerator that is needed.

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

The particular features of the photographic method of detecting atomic particles enabled us to establish the existence of transient forms of matter which had escaped recognition by other methods.

Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.

The material particle nature of primary cosmic radiation has been confirmed, although the processes turned out to be extraordinarily more complicated than we had assumed.

During this period, with a series of excellent students, we further studied hyperon decays.

A feeling that was possibly generated by experiences in my previous work on cosmic rays; more likely it was inborn and was the reason why, as a young man, I went into the field of cosmic rays.

When I received my B. S. degree in 1932, only two of the fundamental particles of physics were known.

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

I can only speak for particle physics. But it has become obvious that on the experimental side, there has been a huge evolution in the number of people who have to collaborate because of the gigantic size of the instruments used, but also because of the enormous task that is data analysis.

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.

My efforts are focused on ensuring that CERN maintains a leading role in the fields of science, technology and education, and that it continues to be a place that unites scientists from around the world.

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.

The long-lived K meson was discovered at Brookhaven.

In the big experiments, Atlas and CMS, we have something like 3,000 scientists each, and over 60 nationalities.