Don Lincoln

“Don turned out to be one of my favorite people to talk to about physics. Truly a unique mind with that Richard Feynman ability of taking very complicated ideas and explaining them simply, without losing any of the essential brilliant insights at the core of those ideas.”

“This digging into deep, fundamental, not understood, mysterious things can 100 or 200 years later transform the world.”

“The accelerator that was working at the time was a large particle accelerator outside Chicago at Fermilab called the Tevatron. And we were colliding protons and antimatter protons near the speed of light at very high energy. And that was the accelerator at which the top quark was discovered in 95.”

“The LHC had 10 times the collisions per second and three and a half times the energy... At the LHC, we make a top quark every second.”

“In about the 1860s or so, James Clark Maxwell took all of those ideas that had been percolating around for the previous 50 years and wrote his laws of electromagnetism... the speed at which these waves move is the speed of light.”

“Leon never really thought of it as anything to do with a religious or even... he was an incredible jokester, the goddamn particle... the book was called the God particle because his publisher thought it would sell more copies.”

“In the 1970s with Vera Rubin, she did a simple thing. She said, how fast are galaxies rotating?... You get an answer, and then you measure it, and it's wrong. And so that's the, wow, huh, I don't know what that is. And that led to the hypothesis of dark matter.”

“Don Lincoln is a co-author on the 1995 top quark discovery paper and author of multiple books including Einstein's Unfinished Dream (Oxford University Press).”