Quotes from Leon M. Lederman

Quantum mechanics can be said to have three remarkable qualities: (1) it is counterintuitive; (2) it works; and (3) it has aspects that made it unacceptable to the likes of Einstein and Schrödinger and that have made it a source of continuing study in the 1990s.

The electrons seem eerily to take both paths at once if nothing is watching, but a definite path if someone or something is watching! These are not particles and not waves-they are both and neither-they are something new: They are quantum states.6

Those who have taken the side streets have changed the way people live on this planet. But those who stay with The Road find that it is clearly marked all the way with the same sign: "How does the universe work?

Schrodinger, for one, rejected it vehemently, regretting having devised the equation that gave rise to it.

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

Einstein cherished the belief that quantum theory was merely a stopgap, which would eventually be replaced by a theory that was deterministic and causal. Over the years, he made many clever attempts to show that uncertainty relations could be circumvented, but they were foiled, one by one, with relish, by Bohr.

It wasn't until 1822 that a reigning pope officially declared that the sun could be at the center of the solar system. And it took until 1985 for the Vatican to acknowledge that Galileo was a great scientist and that he had been wronged by the Church.

A single photon seems to "know" if there are two slits open or only one slit open and it behaves differently accordingly!

We have jerks, assholes, and those who are just dumb... dumb! " "You mean relative to you others," my mother once protested. "No, Mom, dumb like anyone is dumb." "So how did he get a Ph.D.?" "Sitzfleisch, Mom." Sitzfleisch: the ability to sit through any task, to do it again and again until the job is somehow done. Those who give out Ph.D.'s are human too - sooner or later they give in.

Of twenty-three graduates randomly selected at Harvard's 1987 commencement ceremonies, only two could explain why it's hotter in summer than in winter.

The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometers per second.

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 accelerator floor for an hour.

Democritus's work on the void was revolutionary.

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 simple that it will fit easily on the front of a T-shirt.

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 a T-shirt