Wolfgang Ketterle Quotes

There are few moments in science in which you genuinely are excited. The discovery of superfluidity in helium-3 was one of those moments.

I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for. He didn't find it, but we think we're hot on the trail.

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology.

We had to understand things like why the top quark was so heavy and the electron is so light. The Higgs is a big, important step.

Intellectual curiosity drove Einstein to some of the world's most important discoveries.

The discovery of superfluidity opened up a new understanding in the science world.

I had set out to disprove quantum field theory - and the opposite occurred! I was shocked.

There's something called From 'Alchemy to Quarks,' which will teach you everything you have to know, you want to know, about physics.

I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for.

In the late '30's when I was in college, physics - and in particular, nuclear physics - was the most exciting field in the world.

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.

I am fascinated by quantum physics.

Today's particle physics describe light as a crumple in space, and we may have deformed space in such a way that they noticed something peculiar - and they had the ability to investigate it.

Modern low temperature physics began with the liquefaction of helium by Kamerlingh Onnes and the discovery of superconductivity at the University of Leiden in the early part of the 20th century.

While at Chicago my interest in the new field of particle physics was stimulated by a course given by Gell- Mann, who was developing his ideas about Strangeness at the time.

I think it's science and physics are just starting to learn from all these experiments. These experiments have been carried out hundreds and hundreds of times in all sorts of ways that no physicist really questions the end point. I think that these experiments are very clearly telling us that consciousness is limitless and the ultimate reality.

Ernest Rutherford's 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry wasn't given for the nuclear power station - he wouldn't have survived that long - it was given for showing how interesting atomic physics could be.

The events leading to the discovery of tunnelling supercurrents took place while I was working as a research student at the Royal Society Mond Laboratory, Cambridge, under the supervision of Professor Brian Pippard.

One of the things I sort of dreamt about awhile ago is that if Einstein were still alive, it would be absolutely wonderful to go to him and tell him about the discovery, and he would have been very pleased, I'm sure of that.

It is a fascinating fact that father and son have given the most striking evidence for the apparently contradictory properties of the electron: the father proving its character as a particle, the son its character as a wave... Thomson was extremely proud of his son's success and tried to assimilate the new results into his old convictions.

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.

Modern physics has... revealed that every sub-atomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction.

Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.

Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences.

Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It's produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.