Collider Quotes & Sayings

Scientific vocabulary can be so weird. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has just recorded an example of a subatomic particle called the anti-beauty quark. Could it be that ugly people now have something tangible to blame? — Michael Quinion

New Rule: Instead of using their $10 billion atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider to re-create the Big Bang by melting atom parts in temperatures a million times hotter than the sun, scientists should not do that. I'm just sayin' it sounds dangerous. I'm as interested as the next guy in determining the origin of matter, but first couldn't we solve some simple mystery, like why some-detector batteries always die at four a.m.? — Bill Maher

My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we've had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff. — Bill Gates

Though it's with you at every moment, it's always something of a surprise to discover that you can be at once alive and alone. — Andrew Pyper

The Europeans and the Americans are not throwing $10 billion down this gigantic tube for nothing. We're exploring the very forefront of physics and cosmology with the Large Hadron Collider because we want to have a window on creation, we want to recreate a tiny piece of Genesis to unlock some of the greatest secrets of the universe. — Michio Kaku

A woman's fame is the tomb of her happiness. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Looking at scientific inquiry, next paradigm will be based on very large datasets. Scientists are in the lead in handling very large datasets - Hubble telescope or Large Hadron Collider are massive datasets. — David Willetts

In my mind, I am bold and forthright, but what comes out always seems to be so meek and polite. — Gayle Forman

I've given it my all. I've done my best. Now, I'm ready with my family to begin the next phase of our lives. — Richard M. Daley

Collider is a company that I formed with a movie producer, Alisa Tager, and we just wanted to create a place where writers could come and develop their ideas without a regard to limitations of form. — Marc Guggenheim

Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stagecoach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves. — Joe Meno

Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell," Elias said. "We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we're whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We're at the mercy of some kind of whim. — Philip K. Dick

The next big accelerator might be the ILC in Japan, a linear collider which might be able to probe the boundaries of string theory. So we physicists have to learn how to engage the public so that taxpayers money is used to explore the nature of the universe. — Michio Kaku

Nothing sets a person up more than having something turn out just the way it's supposed to be, like falling into a Swiss snowdrift and seeing a big dog come up with a little cask of brandy round its neck. — Claud Cockburn

They say music can alter moods and talk to you. — Eminem

[On the practical applications of particle physics research with the Large Hadron Collider.]
Sometimes the public says, 'What's in it for Numero Uno? Am I going to get better television reception? Am I going to get better Internet reception?' Well, in some sense, yeah ... All the wonders of quantum physics were learned basically from looking at atom-smasher technology ... But let me let you in on a secret: We physicists are not driven to do this because of better color television ... That's a spin-off. We do this because we want to understand our role and our place in the universe. — Michio Kaku

After that cancellation [of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, after $2 billion had been spent on it], we physicists learned that we have to sing for our supper ... The Cold War is over. You can't simply say "Russia!" to Congress, and they whip out their checkbook and say, "How much?" We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives. — Michio Kaku

A man with nothing to die for has even less for which to live. — Margaret Weis

You know the expression, "It's not personal; it's business." We sneer at such rot. All business is personal, all the time. — Chris Kilham

He wondered where his mind had wandered this time, what life it had lived as a trail of neurons sped through networks of possibilities particle-fast, too rapid to catch without a hadron collider, causing super quarks of weirdness and leaving him with only a vague after-image like a melting dream. He had to accept that he couldn't catch all his thoughts, all the things going on in his body, the processes which slipped by in the background just leaving a shadow, an itch, the grain of sand that probably wouldn't become a pearl, a blazing after-trace that lives a second then is gone forever. All those possibilities occurring in a second of frantic life: it never ceased to amaze him. The world was an incredible and beautifully constructed thing.
However, there wasn't really time for a wank. — Karl Drinkwater

Walter Wagner, the man who had gone to court to stop the Large Hadron Collider from beginning operations. A serious charge had been leveled: the LHC was a hazard to the very existence of life on earth. JO: So, roughly speaking, what are the chances the world is going to be destroyed? Is it one in a million, one in a billion? WW: Well, the best we can say right now is about a one-in-two chance. JO: Hold on a second. It's ... fifty-fifty? WW: Yeah, fifty-fifty ... If you have something that can happen, and something that won't necessarily happen, it's going to either happen, or it's going to not happen, and, so, the best guess is one in two. JO: I'm not sure that's how probability works, Walter. — Sean Carroll

Sorrow was my constant companion, even though I no longer wept. It was the shadow that followed me on sunny days, the weight pressing down upon my spirits on cloudy ones. — Melanie Benjamin

Despite my resistance to hyperbole, the LHC belongs to a world that can only be described with superlatives. It is not merely large: the LHC is the biggest machine ever built. It is not merely cold: the 1.9 kelvin (1.9 degrees Celsius above absolute zero) temperature necessary for the LHC's supercomputing magnets to operate is the coldest extended region that we know of in the universe - even colder than outer space. The magnetic field is not merely big: the superconducting dipole magnets generating a magnetic field more than 100,000 times stronger than the Earth's are the strongest magnets in industrial production ever made.

And the extremes don't end there. The vacuum inside the proton-containing tubes, a 10 trillionth of an atmosphere, is the most complete vacuum over the largest region ever produced. The energy of the collisions are the highest ever generated on Earth, allowing us to study the interactions that occurred in the early universe the furthest back in time. — Lisa Randall

The world, with all its impossible variegation and the basic miracle of its existence, draws most mourners out of their grief and back into itself. The homosexual forsythia blooms; the young Irish dancers in Killarney dance, their arms as rigid as shovel handles; secret deals are done involving weapons or office space or crude oil or used cars or drugs; new lovers, believing they will never really have to get up, lie down together; the Large Hadron Collider smashes the Higgs boson into view; snow drapes its white stoles on the bare limbs of winter; the crack of the bat swung by a hefty Dominican pulls a crowd to its feet in Boston; bricks for the new hospital in Phnom Penh are laid in true courses; the single-engine Cessna lands safely in an Ohio alfalfa field during a storm. How can you resist? The true loss in only to the dying, and even the won't feel it when the dying's done. — Daniel Menaker

In trying to get votes for the Superconducting Super Collider, I was very much involved in lobbying members of Congress, testifying to them, bothering them, and I never heard any of them talk about postmodernism or social constructivism. You have to be very learned to be that wrong. — Steven Weinberg