Edward Witten Quotes

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

I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.

I had been interested in particle physics, which deals with the fundamental constituents of matter.

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.

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.

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.

The top quark was discovered in 1995, and since then, the Higgs has become our obsession because the standard model was incomplete without it.

As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore.

Not only am I not persuaded by the testimony; I do not even understand it. For me the charm of quarks is well hidden ...

To me, the most exciting thing about the discovery of the Higgs particle is that its existence was predicted fifty years before its discovery through experiment.

I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature. The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.

I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.

In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there. You look inside the atom, and eventually you discover quarks. Who would have thought that?

Physicists have yet to understand why the Higgs boson's mass is what it is.

It's indeed surprising that replacing the elementary particle with a string leads to such a big change in things. I'm tempted to say that it has to do with the fuzziness it introduces.

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.

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

I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary - the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses.

Among the questions we have in mind: dark matter, antimatter, and matter symmetry.

In the lab, we could not see or physically describe the mathematical objects that we called quarks, which we suspected were the key to unlocking the dynamics of the strong force that binds together the clump of protons and neutrons at the center of the atom.

We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is.

The first interview I gave to the press was in 1987 when some people thought a previous machine at Cern, called LEP, might have enough energy to produce the particle.

I do theoretical particle physics. We're trying to understand the most basic structure of matter. And the way you do that is you have to look at really small distances. And to get to small distances, you need high energies.

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.