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"... I said I am doing experiments on pions. Einstein said, "Pions! Pions! We dont understand the electron. Why do you bother with pions? ..."
Leon M. LedermanAre we making more mistakes now? I dont think so. Science is a high-ri — Leon M. Lederman
"Are we making more mistakes now? I dont think so. Science is a high-risk activity. And when you do science—this is very important incidentally for the general public, and for policy makers—if you are not wasting some of your money, you are not doing good science. Its a funny way to say this. Youve got to back high-risk opportunities. And high-risk opportunities means some fraction of them are going to fail. And I think in any science funding scenario, youve got to say, 10, 20, maybe even 30% of your funds are going to be invested in failures."
Leon M. Lederman
Leon M. Lederman
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Leon Max Lederman was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illin
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"I went into physics to hang around with the bright kids. I wasnt doing anything else and I didnt want to look dumb, so I thought Id pretend to be a physicist, just like the others. It was five or ten years after my Ph.D. before I realized I was pretty good."
Leon M. LedermanQuote
"Leon is a giant in our field in particle physics. ... he was an all-around approachable person. ... he had an open-door policy. ..."
Leon M. LedermanQuote
"Science is not about status quo. It’s about revolution."
Leon M. LedermanQuote
"Thats the eureka moment, when suddenly you know something. Your hands sweat, you get into all kinds of symptoms of tremendous excitement. First of all, its fear. Is it right? And its incredible humor. How could it be any other way? It had to be that way! How could we have been so stupid, not to see this?"
Leon M. LedermanQuote
"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."
Leon M. Lederman