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

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

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

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

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

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.

When I talk about the pain and hardship of a scientist's life, I'm speaking of more than existential angst. Galileo's work was condemned by the Church; Madame Curie paid with her life, a victim of leukemia wrought by radiation poisoning. Too many of us develop cataracts. None of us gets enough sleep. Most of what we know about the universe we know thanks to a lot of guys (and ladies) who stayed up late at night.