The God Particle Quotes

“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?

“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?

“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?

“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?

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometers per second.”
― 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

“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 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

“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