Simon van der Meer Quotes

A linear accelerator has the advantage that no magnet is required and that its cost should not rise much more steeply than with the energy of the particles required.

It might seem paradoxical that the biggest scientific instruments of all are needed in order to probe the very smallest things in nature. The micro-world is inherently 'fuzzy' - the sharper the detail we wish to study, the higher the energy that is required and the bigger the accelerator that is needed.

In England and the United States, where physicists have at their disposal equipment of very high voltages, several new elements were prepared using protons and deuterons as projectiles.

Janet Landis came to work in my group in the summer of 1957 when our first bubble-chamber was churning out its earliest pictures.

The long-lived K meson was discovered at Brookhaven.

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

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

But a machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the Solar System - and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.

That name was a kind of joke, and not a very good one. An author, Leon Lederman, wanted to call it 'that goddamn particle' because it was clear it was going to be a tough job finding it experimentally. His editor wouldn't have that, and he said 'okay, call it the God particle', and the editor accepted it. I don't think he should've have done, because it's so misleading.

If (the antiproton) had not been discovered, the foundations of physics really would have crumbled.

The next big accelerator might be the ILC in Japan, a linear collider which might be able to probe the boundaries of string theory. So we physicists have to learn how to engage the public so that taxpayers money is used to explore the nature of the universe.

A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.

Einstein ... always spoke to me of Rutherford in the highest terms, calling him a second Newton.

So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little.

He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

We construct and keep on constructing, yet intuition is still a good thing.

Positive energy brings good feelings, and dark energy often means harm. But the destruction in dark energy is also a subtle aspect of construction, like how even forest fires have their benefits. Sometimes enemies are our best teachers, people can learn from their mistakes, destruction sometimes means rebirth.

I just love building buildings. I'm the largest developer in New York City. I'm having a lot of fun doing it. I think I've never had more fun. I'm just enjoying my life.

The nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists not in its being something which is hard or heavy or coloured, or which affects the senses in any way, but simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth and depth.

Indeed, nothing more beautifully simplifying has ever happened in the history of science than the whole series of discoveries culminating about 1914 which finally brought practically universal acceptance to the theory that the material world contains but two fundamental entities, namely, positive and negative electrons, exactly alike in charge, but differing widely in mass, the positive electron-now usually called a proton-being 1850 times heavier than the negative, now usually called simply the electron.

I therefore take the liberty of proposing for this hypothetical new atom, which is not light but plays an essential part in every process of radiation, the name photon.

A terrace nine stories high begins with a pile of earth.

I'm still really into set design and construction when I do films. I notice that stuff.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.