Elementary particles quotes:

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If experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles. -- John Horton Conway
We will have to abandon the philosophy of Democritus and the concept of elementary particles. We should accept instead the concept of elementary symmetries. -- Werner Heisenberg
[T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts. -- Werner Heisenberg
What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced. -- Antony Garrett Lisi
We converse as we live by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of elementary particles it builds a world. -- William H. Gass
Specific units - such as memes are intended to represent have meaning when there is essential discontinuity between categories. Such convenient discontinuities are found in atoms, elementary particles, genes, and DNA. -- Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
The creative element in the mind of man . . . emerges in as mysterious a fashion as those elementary particles which leap into momentary existence in great cyclotrons, only to vanish again like infinitesimal ghosts. -- Loren Eiseley
Just like an ordinary guitar string, a fundamental string can vibrate in different modes. And it is these different modes of vibration of the string that are understood in string theory as being the different elementary particles. -- Lee Smolin
My present work concerns the problems connected with the theory of elementary particles, the theory of gravitation and cosmology and I shall be glad if I can manage to make some contribution to these important branches of science. -- Andrei Sakharov
What I try to do in the book is to trace the chain of relationships running from elementary particles, fundamental building blocks of matter everywhere in the universe, such as quarks, all the way to complex entities, and in particular complex adaptive system like jaguars. -- Murray Gell-Mann
Technically you need the extra dimensions. At first people didn't like them too much, but they've got a big benefit, which is that the ability of string theory to describe all the elementary particles and their forces along with gravity depends on using the extra dimensions. -- Edward Witten
String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string. -- Edward Witten
I think also of my colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands, and feel that in some measure I am here as a representative of our small, informal, international fraternity. -- Murray Gell-Mann
It's indeed surprising that replacing the elementary particle with a string leads to such a big change in things. I'm tempted to say that it has to do with the fuzziness it introduces. -- Edward Witten
I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary - the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses. -- Leonard Susskind
In 2002, a Scottish journalist, during a dinner meant to be private, absolutely wanted me to react to Stephen Hawking's comments. I said one shouldn't pay too much attention to what Hawking was saying because he was a celebrity but not a specialist of elementary particle theory. -- Peter Higgs
Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them. -- Steven Weinberg

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