33 Quotes by Burton Richter

Science is particularly needed to bring the attention of government policy-makers to problems that they don't know about yet.

I succumbed to temptation and became a scientific administrator, first as Technical Director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center from 1982 to 1984, and then Director from 1984 to 1999. The job of a laboratory director is much different from the job of a physicist, particularly in a time of tight budgets. It is much easier to do physics when someone else gets the funds than it is to get the funds for others to do the research.

I completed my senior thesis on the quadratic Zeeman effect in hydrogen.

Starving the future to feed the present is a mistake – it leads to obsolescence and stagnation. Sometimes it is hard to make this understood.

For nuclear power to have a future, we'll either need more Yucca Mountains or a way to decrease the stuff we put there.

During my first year as a graduate student, we worked on a measurement of the isotope shift and hyperfine structure of mercury isotopes.

Politics is a lot tougher than physics.

While a lab director can get done the things that he regards as important, he has the more important job of bringing out the best ideas of the broader scientific community. I learned this early in my career while I was leading the construction of the SPEAR facility.

Theorists can create all sorts of theories which go beyond the Standard Model. But there's not one bit of experimental evidence to point out which way you should go.