Burton Richter Quotes

When I was four or five years old, my grandfather showed me how to build things, paint, saw. Through years of fixing bikes, repairing lawn mowers, I learned how things work.

That's the nice thing about doing research. Whatever you do is novel, so you always have this sense of novelty, even if you are only using a new gadget.

I think that's something a scientist can do because a scientist works at a border, at the edge of science, at the edge of knowledge, and so there's a lot of fun of reaching out and thinking about things that other people didn't think about. And so it has a kind of exploratory notion, kind of adventurous part in it.

We need to get across the excitement and creativity of science. That it isn't just a list of facts that have already been discovered - but a process, a creative project, that you are generating ideas, testing them and looking for evidence.

Pursue science because it is knowledge, because it broadens our horizons. There is so much more to be discovered.

I think all scientists are like detectives. We are most happy when we find something that doesn't fit our expectations.

Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.

Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off... All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.

The sequence of theorist, experimenter, and discovery has occasionally been compared to the sequence of farmer, pig, truffle. The farmer leads the pig to an area where there might be truffles. The pig searches diligently for the truffles. Finally, he locates one, and just as he is about to devour it, the farmer snatches it away.

Science demands patience.

It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem should be "interesting".

At school, I was fanatical about being a scientist.

People don't realize how many aspects of our lives are touched in one way or another by not just the discoveries, the technological breakthroughs, but the process of science.

There are so many aspects to science that I couldn't give up - the rigor, the discoveries, the teaching. The impact that science has on the world around us is something I'm enthralled with. I don't think anyone could ever take that out of me.

If people like Edison had waited to make every - or Ben Franklin or some of those people had waited to solve every problem on Earth before they did their research or before they were curious about doing something new, we'd never have made a lot of the progress we have.

Those of us engaged in the practice of science come to feel a certain reverence for it, engendered by its demonstrable power to dissect, clarify, and explain what previously was unexplainable, and thus to improve the human condition.

We need to not reduce but increase our commitment to research.

I like to think of 'the studio' as a laboratory where I can go in, learn tricks, apply, revise, and release. I'd figure I had about the same emotional attachment to my craft as a guy over at NASA does over... NASA stuff.

I always say to my students that being a scientist is like being an explorer, and I really mean that because, in a sense, I think in science we explore the world, the universe around us.

You should enter science because you are fascinated by it. That's what I did.

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.

Science is fun, and it's fundamental.

Research sometimes feels like an ongoing TV series in which some amazing revelations have already been made, but there are still plenty of cliff-hangers and unresolved plotlines that you want to see resolved. But unlike TV, we have to do the work ourselves to figure out what happens next.

I think the scientific goals and the technical challenges were the two things that equally motivated me.

I'm very inquisitive, and I always have questions and need to touch things to see how it works or why it works.