"We haven't the foggiest idea what drives the new high-temperature superconductors, or what makes a snowflake, or how the mind or the economy works. What is more, nothing high energy physics can do will ever be of the slightest direct help in solving these overwhelmingly hard problems"

Philip Anderson, The Case Against the SSC, 1987
(Anderson was one of the theorists who are credited for discovering the "Higgs mechanism" in the early 1960s. He is a 1977 Nobel laureate in Physics for his studies of the electron structure of magnetic systems)

It has taken 19.5 years to Italy to sanate a wound to its democratic fabric, one which made the country look like a sort of Banana republic, where a tycoon could acquire consensus through his mediatic power, rule unchallenged, and break the law without punishment. But finally we got around it yesterday afternoon, where a vote of the Senate of Republic has decreed that Silvio Berlusconi is unfit to hold a seat in the Parliament.

The top quark is the most massive elementary particle that we have so far discovered at particle accelerators. One usually describes this by saying that the top mass is about 185 times larger than the mass of a whole proton; but since the proton is a composite object, it is not the best comparison stone; I would prefer to compare the top mass to the mass of the lightest quark, which we only roughly know to be in the range of a 2 to 5 MeV. Then one gets a more dramatic picture: the up quark and the top quark are both elementary particles, but the latter is 50,000 times larger than the former. Can that be true ?

"This time we're shooting through a brick!"

Larry Nodulman (during a discussion on the reconstruction of electrons in the CDF II detector, just refurbished with a new set of silicon microstrip layers (SVX'), more powerful and capable of identifying the impact parameter of charged tracks with a dozen micron accuracy, but also heavier and bulkier than its predecessor, and thus providing more material for multiple scattering of particles.)