Rolf-Dieter Heuer Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

My present work concerns the problems connected with the theory of elementary particles, the theory of gravitation and cosmology and I shall be glad if I can manage to make some contribution to these important branches of science.

I'm a fan of supersymmetry, largely because it seems to be the only route by which gravity can be brought into the scheme. It's probably not even enough, but it's a way forward to get gravity involved. If you have supersymmetry, then there are more of these particles. That would be my favourite outcome.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.

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

The best theory comes from string theory, which states that dark matter is nothing but a higher vibration of the string. We are, in some sense, the lowest octave of a vibrating string.

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.

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

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

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

From a scientific point of view, our mission is to seek answers to the fundamental questions about the universe. Many are open - we don't know about dark matter, which accounts for a quarter of the universe's matter, nor do we know why there's antimatter.

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.

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. You look inside the atom, and eventually you discover quarks. Who would have thought that?

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.

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