Leon M. Lederman Quotes

#1. 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.

Leon M. Lederman

#2. I'm so old I can remember when the Dead Sea was only sick.

Leon M. Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman

#4. I started out as a molecules kid. In high school and early college I loved chemistry, but I gradually shifted toward physics, which seemed cleaner - odorless, in fact.

Leon M. Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman

#6. Particle physics suffers more from being infected by the socio-political mood of the day than from lack of spectacular opportunities for major and profound discoveries.

Leon M. Lederman

#7. Democritus's work on the void was revolutionary.

Leon M. Lederman

#8. 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, everything else is opinion' ...

Leon M. Lederman

#9. 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 theory.

Leon M. Lederman

#10. My children have often asked me why I never received a Nobel Prize. I used to tell them it was because the Nobel committee couldn't make up its mind which of my projects to recognize.

Leon M. Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman

#12. Experimenters don't come in late - they never went home.

Leon M. Lederman

#13. 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 so it seems. They need to know just enough; when they're young they haven't accumulated the intellectual baggage.

Leon M. Lederman

#14. Science is not about status quo. It's about revolution.

Leon M. Lederman

#15. 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 spare time.

Leon M. Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman

#17. 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 and discarded by Einstein, the aether is now making a Nixonian comeback. It's really the vacuum, but burdened by theoretical, ghostly particles.

Leon M. Lederman

#18. I feel emotionally conflicted. It's like when your mother in-law drives off a cliff in your new Porsche.

Leon M. Lederman

#19. Those who do not stop asking silly questions become scientists.

Leon M. Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman

#21. 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.

Leon M. Lederman

#22. Neutrinos ... win the minimalist contest: zero charge, zero radius, and very possibly zero mass.

Leon M. Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman