Leon M. Lederman Quotes

17 quotes in 342 categories

• I sometimes think about the tower at Pisa as the first particle accelerator, a (nearly) vertical linear accelerator that Galileo used in his studies.
• Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money.
• The real goal of physics is to come up with an equation that could explain the universe but still be small enough to fit on…
• The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing…
• Democritus's work on the void was revolutionary.
• He [Democritus] is probably best known for two of the most scientifically intuitive quotes ever uttered by an ancient: 'Nothing exists except atoms and space,…
• Where do we stand today compared to Greece circa 400 B.C.? Today's experiment-driven 'standard model' is not all that dissimilar to Democritus's speculative [sic] atomic…
• The British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that philosophy went downhill after Democritus and did not recover until the Renaissance.
• The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God ...
• During an intense period of lab work, the outside world vanishes and the obsession is total. Sleep is when you can curl up on the…
• Theorists write all the popular books on science: Heinz Pagels, Frank Wilczek, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, et al. And why not? They have all that…
• Theorists tend to peak at an early age; the creative juices tend to gush very early and start drying up past the age of fifteen-or…
• One of the major ingredients for professional success in science is luck. Without this, forget it.
• Science should have no less lofty a goal. My ambition is to live to see all of physics reduced to a formula so elegant and…
• 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…
• A theoretical physicist can spend his entire lifetime missing the intellectual challenge of experimental work, experiencing none of the thrills and dangers - the overhead…
• The aether: Invented by Isaac Newton, reinvented by James Clerk Maxwell. This is the stuff that fills up the empty space of the universe. Discredited…

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