Leon M. Lederman Quotes

This is often the way it is in physics - our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort.

[Chemistry] laboratory work was my first challenge. ... I still carry the scars of my first discovery-that test-tubes are fragile.

Physics and those parts of other fields that grow out of physics - chemistry, the structure of big molecules - in those domains, there is a lot of progress. In many other domains, there is very little progress in developing real scientific understanding.

If the experimental physicist has already done a great deal of work in this field, nevertheless the theoretical physicist has still hardly begun to evaluate the experimental material which may lead him to conclusions about the structure of the atom.

I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn't be found.

This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.

With the discovery of the Higgs boson, one of the questions has been ticked off the list, but there are many others. We hope that we can find answers or hints for answers to at least some of them. But of course, this is in the hands of nature.

It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.

There are physicists, and there are string theorists. Of course the string theorists are physicists, but the string theorists in general will not attend lectures on experimental physics. They will not be terribly concerned about the results of experiments. They will talk to one another.

Life would be indeed easier if the experimentalists would only pause for a little while!

You have that one basic string, but it can vibrate in many ways. But we're trying to get a lot of particles because experimental physicists have discovered a lot of particles.

So when you ask me how string theory might be tested, I can tell you what's likely to happen at accelerators or some parts of the theory that are likely to be tested.

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

Half the experimental physicists studied and fully 84 percent of the theoreticians were the sons of professional men, typically engineers, physicians, and teachers …. None of the fathers … were the sons of unskilled laborers.

What lots of people have been trying to do ever since is find what's beyond the current Standard Model. So far, it has stood impervious to all attacks.

I always wanted to be an experimental physicist and was attracted to the idea of using continuing advances in technology to carry out fundamental science experiments that could not be done otherwise.

Theoretical physics hardly requires any research funding, so I never felt the need. The overall government and institutional support has been good enough for my work.

The science behind Interstellar is interesting, because some of it is absolutely real astrophysics and orbital mechanics, some of it is theoretical physics, and some of it is completely Hollywood. When a science fiction movie is based on plausible science, it's really good.

In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down.

String theories, for instance, they require seven additional dimensions. So, as experimentalists we should, with our high-tech instruments like the Large Hadron Collider, just listen to nature and to what nature wants to tell us.

Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory.

Until now, physical theories have been regarded as merely models with approximately describe the reality of nature. As the models improve, so the fit between theory and reality gets closer. Some physicists are now claiming that supergravity is the reality, that the model and the real world are in mathematically perfect accord.

I thought I wanted to be a physicist in high school until I learned that there was much more math than philosophy in it. I assumed I would just sit around all day and think.

No. I had successfully solved the difficulty of finding a description of the electron which was consistent with both relativity and quantum mechanics. Of course, when you solve one difficulty, other new difficulties arise. You then try to sove them. You can never solve all difficulties at once.

No one must think that Newton’s great creation can be overthrown in any real sense by this [Theory of Relativity] or by any other theory. His clear and wide ideas will for ever retain their significance as the foundation on which our modern conceptions of physics have been built.