Lederman Quotes

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

Leon M. Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman

#4. 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

#5. The best fight I ever saw without question, I was very fortunate to be a judge in the fight, between the then current WBC 122 pound champion Wilfredo Gomez, and the reigning WBC 118 pound champion Lupe Pintor. It was absolutely beyond belief.

Harold Lederman

#6. If the referee happens to be in the way you just yell, 'move or I'll break your ankles!' which I used to do with referees. Some refs will stop and watch the fight it drives you crazy.

Harold Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman

#10. If you're working a fight with let's say John Ruiz and ... anyone and Ruiz goes jab, jab and grab, you better see whose landing the punches before it becomes a wrestling match.

Harold Lederman

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

Leon M. Lederman

#15. 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

#16. I never really had much problem scoring a fight, you call it the way you see it. The most important thing is concentration you really got to concentrate.

Harold Lederman

#17. There's no question you get caught up in the drama but I always concentrate on whose winning and whose losing that's for sure. That's one thing you can't do in boxing is lose your concentration, watch your mind wander.

Harold Lederman

#18. I try to add as much as I can before a director says, 'Harold shut up!'

Harold Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

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

Leon M. Lederman

#24. 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

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

Leon M. Lederman

#26. 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

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

Leon M. Lederman

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

Leon M. Lederman

#29. Any of the great fights you've ever seen, Gomez and Pintor was just better.

Harold Lederman

#30. 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