Particle Accelerator Quotes

Leave the atom alone.

The discovery that light elements could be disintegrated by artificially accelerated particles gave an additional impetus to development work on the various methods of producing them.

For it goes without saying that this great recognition at this time will aid tremendously our efforts to find the necessarily large funds for the next voyage of exploration farther into the depths of the atom.

I don't really know what a cyclotron is but I am certainly very happy Canada has one!

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

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.

When I was 16 years old, I assembled a 2.3 million electron volt beta particle accelerator. I went to Westinghouse, I got 400 pounds of translator steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I assembled a 6-kilowatt, 2.3 million electron accelerator in the garage.

The pattern of things was that each of the research students would be doing some particular experiment on the accelerator, often involving the building of counters or a system like that.

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

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.

Around 1960, I moved back to Europe, attracted by the newly founded European Organization for Nuclear Research where, for the first time, the idea of a joint European effort in a field of pure science was to be tried in practice.

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.

I was about 10 when I got into nuclear science. That was when that spark hit me. It took a few years of research, but when I was 14, I produced my first nuclear-fusion reaction.

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.

After that cancellation [of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, after $2 billion had been spent on it], we physicists learned that we have to sing for our supper. ... The Cold War is over. You can't simply say "Russia!" to Congress, and they whip out their checkbook and say, "How much?" We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives.

Since then, I have worked with the group that commissioned and improved the ring and that is now preparing the construction of a second ring to increase the p stacking rate by an order of magnitude.

One day I went up to my mom and I said, 'Mom, can I have permission to build a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher - a betatron - in the garage?' And my mom stared at me, and she said, 'Sure. Why not? And don't forget to take out the garbage.'

The long-lived K meson was discovered at Brookhaven.

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.

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.

Experiments that crash atoms together could start a chain reaction that erodes everything on Earth.

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

What The Source becomes, in a physical sense, is almost like this particle accelerator. There's all these different, discrete voices and ideas. If you just saw two of them together perhaps it might seem completely diverse and like, "Why do you have these two people together?" But as it grows and as it speeds up, it kind of creates a larger dialogue.