Leon M. Lederman Quotes

Theorists write all the popular books on science: Heinz Pagels, Frank Wilczek, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, et al. And why not? They have all that spare time.

Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money.

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

The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God.

Those who do not stop asking silly questions become scientists.

We hope to explain the entire universe in a single, simple formula that you can wear on your T-shirt.

Science should have no less lofty a goal. My ambition is to live to see all of physics reduced to a formula so elegant and simple that it will fit easily on the front of a T-shirt.

My children have often asked me why I never received a Nobel Prize. I used to tell them it was because the Nobel committee couldn’t make up its mind which of my projects to recognize.

I'm so old I can remember when the Dead Sea was only sick.

One of the major ingredients for professional success in science is luck. Without this, forget it.

Neutrinos ... win the minimalist contest: zero charge, zero radius, and very possibly zero mass.

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.

During an intense period of lab work, the outside world vanishes and the obsession is total. Sleep is when you can curl up on the accelerator floor for an hour.

I started out as a molecules kid. In high school and early college I loved chemistry, but I gradually shifted toward physics, which seemed cleaner - odorless, in fact.

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.

He [Democritus] is probably best known for two of the most scientifically intuitive quotes ever uttered by an ancient: 'Nothing exists except atoms and space, everything else is opinion'.

By the grace of AEC, BNL, God, Green and Hayworth (alphabetical order), we should see neutrinos.

The real goal of physics is to come up with an equation that could explain the universe but still be small enough to fit on a T-shirt

Experimenters don’t come in late—they never went home.

Where do we stand today compared to Greece circa 400 B.C.? Today's experiment-driven 'standard model' is not all that dissimilar to Democritus's speculative [sic] atomic theory.

Science is not about status quo. It's about revolution.

Democritus's work on the void was revolutionary.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that philosophy went downhill after Democritus and did not recover until the Renaissance.