Higgs Boson, God Particle Quotes

In many ways, string theory attempts to go beyond Einstein's dream... an all-encompassing description of nature that works at large distances where gravity becomes important as well as small distances where quantum mechanics is important.

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.

If I take the theory as we have it now, literally, I would conclude that extra dimensions really exist. They're part of nature. We don't really know how big they are yet, but we hope to explore that in various ways.

I came to realise that string theory offers us the best hope of finding a unified theory of all matter and forces.

It's not completely obvious what gravity is, fundamentally, or what dimensions are, fundamentally. One of these days we'll understand better what we mean, what is the fundamental thing that's given us space in the first place and dimensions of space in particular.

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 beauty of science is to imagine more than we can prove. And string theory gives you a radically different interpretation of the universe.

The theory has to be interpreted that extra dimensions beyond the ordinary four dimensions the three spatial dimensions plus time are sufficiently small that they haven't been observed yet.

Throughout my work, I have assumed that the standard model is correct, and hence, the Higgs boson should be found. Although this is not directly connected to string theory, the discovery of the Higgs boson demonstrated the power of theoretical reasoning.

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

Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It's not like we're working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy.

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.

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.

String theory's biggest prediction is that gravity exists. That's good. That's a lot more than preceding theories could do.

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.

I had been interested in particle physics, which deals with the fundamental constituents of matter.

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

When I coined the term “the God Particle” for the Higgs Boson, I inadvertently offended two group of people: Those who believe in God and those who don’t believe in God.

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

Look at what's happening with scientific things. They have discovered dark matter. They have discovered what is called the God Particle. All that is going to make religion obsolete. These are the things that are amazing, and it's an amazing time to be living in. It's a higher energy that we're going to be coming into.

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.

We know that if supersymmetric particles exist, they must be very heavy; otherwise we would have spotted them by now.

I do feel strongly that string theory is our best hope for making progress at unifying gravity and quantum mechanics.

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.