Quotes from Leon M. Lederman

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.

By the grace of AEC, BNL, God, Green and Hayworth (alphabetical order), we should see neutrinos.

We hope to explain the entire universe in a single, simple formula that you can wear on your T-shirt.

Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money.

I sometimes think about the tower at Pisa as the first particle accelerator, a (nearly) vertical linear accelerator that Galileo used in his studies.

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.

One of the major ingredients for professional success in science is luck. Without this, forget it.

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.

One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant. ...The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free. ...Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained.

Which of the two possibilities corresponds to reality is simply unknown until a definite measurement is made, at which point the quantum state instantaneously changes to reflect the result of that measurement.

Newton's equations of absolute exactitude and certainty ("classical determinism") were replaced by Schrodinger's new equations and Heisenberg's mathematics of fuzziness, indeterminacy, and probability.

He saw that, ultimately, only possibilities for events and their probabilities of occurring, with intrinsic uncertainties, exist. This was the emerging new reality of quantum physics.

The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God.

Wolfgang Pauli, to seriously consider quitting in 1925. "For me," he wrote in exasperation to a colleague, "physics is too difficult and I wish that I were a film comedian or something similar and had never heard of physics.

Aristotle is generally credited (probably unreasonably) with holding up the progress of physics for about 2,000 years—until Galileo had the courage and the conviction to call him out.

The public sees science as some monolithic edifice of unbending rules and beliefs, and—thanks to the media's portrayal of scientists as uptight nerds in white coats—sees scientists as stodgy old artery-hardened defenders of the status quo.

While Heisenberg had described the tusks and Schrodinger the trunk, the total elephant is so much more than its parts.

The Born interpretation of the Schrödinger equation is the single most dramatic and major change in our world view since Newton.

If Pythagoras were alive today, he would live in the Malibu hills or perhaps Marin County. He'd hang out at health-food restaurants accompanied by an avid following of bean-hating young women with names like Sundance Acacia or Princess Gaia. Or maybe he'd be an adjunct professor of mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The atomists knew that causation must start from something, and that no cause can be assigned to this original something. Motion was simply a given. The atomists asked mechanistic questions and gave mechanistic answers. When they asked "Why?" they meant: what was the cause of an event? When their successors—Plato, Aristotle, and so on—asked "Why?" they were searching for the purpose of an event.

topic: Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe [Amherst, NY: Prometheus

My ambition is to live to see all of physics reduced to a formula so elegant and simple that it will fit easily on the front of a T-shirt.

Nature hides the simplicity in a thicket of complicating circumstances, and the experimenter's job is to prune away these complications.