Martin Rees Quotes

Although important nuclear physics work was to go on in laboratories such as ours had become - and we had to cut down to a lower energy group - it was not fundamentally opening up new insights on the structure of matter. That required you to be in a higher league.

Around 1960, I moved back to Europe, attracted by the newly founded European Organization for Nuclear Research where, for the first time, the idea of a joint European effort in a field of pure science was to be tried in practice.

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

During my participation in the Manhattan Project and subsequent research at Los Alamos, encompassing a period of fifteen years, I worked in the company of perhaps the greatest collection of scientific talent the world has ever known.

Information of fundamental importance to the general problem of atomic structure has resulted from systematic studies of the cosmic radiation carried out by the Wilson cloud-chamber method.

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

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.

My first visit to the Large Hadron Collider was in April 2008, before it started up, and CERN had some open days. They were slightly shocked by the end of it because I think they got something like 50,000 visitors.

The discovery that light elements could be disintegrated by artificially accelerated particles gave an additional impetus to development work on the various methods of producing them.

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.

In 1947 I defended my thesis on nuclear physics, and in 1948 I was included in a group of research scientists whose task was to develop nuclear weapons.

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.

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

Originally I had planned to revert to nuclear physics there, in particular the structure of the deuteron.

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.

Investigating the forces that hold the nuclear particles together was a long task.

Instead of an attic with a few test tubes, bits of wire and odds and ends, the attack on the atomic nucleus has required the development and construction of great instruments on an engineering scale.

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.

From a consideration of the immense volume of newly discovered facts in the field of physics, especially atomic physics, in recent years it might well appear to the layman that the main problems were already solved and that only more detailed work was necessary.

I was interested in nuclei originally with my deuteron photo work because that was one of the fundamental forces, and the measurement was basic to new science.

Uranium Committee of the National Bureau of Standards

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.