Leon M. Lederman > Quotes

“I feel emotionally conflicted. It's like when your mother in-law drives off a cliff in your new Porsche.”
― Leon Lederman

“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.”
― Leon M. Lederman

“One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant. ...The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free. ...Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

“Which of the two possibilities corresponds to reality is simply unknown until a definite measurement is made, at which point the quantum state instantaneously changes to reflect the result of that measurement.”
― Leon M. Lederman, Quantum Physics for Poets

“The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

“Nature hides the simplicity in a thicket of complicating circumstances, and the experimenter’s job is to prune away these complications.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle

“If Pythagoras were alive today, he would live in the Malibu hills or perhaps Marin County. He’d hang out at health-food restaurants accompanied by an avid following of bean-hating young women with names like Sundance Acacia or Princess Gaia. Or maybe he’d be an adjunct professor of mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle

“NATURE IS LUMPY”
― Leon M. Lederman, Quantum Physics for Poets

“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.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle

“He saw that, ultimately, only possibilities for events and their probabilities of occurring, with intrinsic uncertainties, exist. This was the emerging new reality of quantum physics.”
― Leon M. Lederman, Quantum Physics for Poets

“Quantum mechanics can be said to have three remarkable qualities: (1) it is counterintuitive; (2) it works; and (3) it has aspects that made it unacceptable to the likes of Einstein and Schrödinger and that have made it a source of continuing study in the 1990s.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle

“The Born interpretation of the Schrödinger equation is the single most dramatic and major change in our world view since Newton.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle

“Newton's equations of absolute exactitude and certainty ("classical determinism") were replaced by Schrodinger's new equations and Heisenberg's mathematics of fuzziness, indeterminacy, and probability.”
― Leon M. Lederman, Quantum Physics for Poets

“The atomists knew that causation must start from something, and that no cause can be assigned to this original something. Motion was simply a given. The atomists asked mechanistic questions and gave mechanistic answers. When they asked “Why?” they meant: what was the cause of an event? When their successors—Plato, Aristotle, and so on—asked “Why?” they were searching for the purpose of an event.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle

“topic: Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe [Amherst, NY: Prometheus”
― Leon M. Lederman, Beyond the God Particle

“The physicists defer only to the mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

“One can see the probabilistic behavior of photons in ordinary everyday occurrences. Suppose you look at a window display at your favorite Victoria's Secret lingerie store. Superimposed over the shoes of the sexy mannequins you observe a faint image of yourself in the window. What is happening? Light is a stream of particles-photons-that produce a bizarre quantumlike result. Most of the photons-say, coming from a source like the Sun-reflect off your face and pass right through the store window, providing a clear image of you (handsome devil!) to anyone who happens to be on the other side of the window (the window mannequin dresser?). But some small fraction of the photons are reflected back from the glass to provide that dim image of you overlaying
the skimpy undergarments in the window display. All photons are identical, so why are”
― Leon M. Lederman, Quantum Physics for Poets

“Copenhagen”
― Leon M. Lederman, Quantum Physics for Poets

“We have jerks, assholes, and those who are just dumb...dumb!"

"You mean relative to you others," my mother once protested.

"No, Mom, dumb like anyone is dumb."

"So how did he get a Ph.D.?"

"Sitzfleisch, Mom."

Sitzfleisch: the ability to sit through any task, to do it again and again until the job is somehow done. Those who give out Ph.D.'s are human too - sooner or later they give in.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

“Schrodinger, for one, rejected it vehemently, regretting having devised the equation that gave rise to it.”
― Leon M. Lederman, Quantum Physics for Poets

“Those who have taken the side streets have changed the way people live on this planet. But those who stay with The Road find that it is clearly marked all the way with the same sign: “How does the universe work?”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle

“The public sees science as some monolithic edifice of unbending rules and beliefs, and—thanks to the media’s portrayal of scientists as uptight nerds in white coats—sees scientists as stodgy old artery-hardened defenders of the status quo.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle

“Aristotle is generally credited (probably unreasonably) with holding up the progress of physics for about 2,000 years—until Galileo had the courage and the conviction to call him out.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle

“I like relativity and quantum theories because I don’t understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can’t settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind. —D. H. Lawrence”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle

“The electrons seem eerily to take both paths at once if nothing is watching, but a definite path if someone or something is watching! These are not particles and not waves-they are both and neither-they are something new: They are quantum states.6”
― Leon M. Lederman, Quantum Physics for Poets

“It wasn’t until 1822 that a reigning pope officially declared that the sun could be at the center of the solar system. And it took until 1985 for the Vatican to acknowledge that Galileo was a great scientist and that he had been wronged by the Church.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle

“Einstein cherished the belief that quantum theory was merely a stopgap, which would eventually be replaced by a theory that was deterministic and causal. Over the years, he made many clever attempts to show that uncertainty relations could be circumvented, but they were foiled, one by one, with relish, by Bohr.”
― Leon M. Lederman, Quantum Physics for Poets

“Wolfgang Pauli, to seriously consider quitting in 1925. "For me," he wrote in exasperation to a colleague, "physics is too difficult and I wish that I were a film comedian or something similar and had never heard of physics.”
― Leon M. Lederman, Quantum Physics for Poets

“The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometers per second.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle

“Of twenty-three graduates randomly selected at Harvard’s 1987 commencement ceremonies, only two could explain why it’s hotter in summer than in winter.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle