Chris Quigg

Chris Quigg

Chris Quigg (born 15 December 1944) is an American theoretical physicist, who was head of the Theoretical Physics Department at Fermilab from 1977 to 1987.

Quotes

• The Higgs boson is an essential part of the analogy to the Meissner effect in superconductivity that leads us to an excellent understanding of the masses of the electroweak gauge bosons W^± and Z⁰ as consequences of electroweak symmetry breaking.
  • Visions- the coming revolutions of particle physics. 2002, p. 5.

• If there is no connection between quarks and leptons, since quarks make up the proton, then the balance of the proton and electron charge is just a remarkable coincidence. It seems impossible for any thinking person to be satisfied with coincidence as an explanation. Some principle must relate the charges of the quarks and the leptons. What is it? A fancier way of saying it, and more or less equivalent, is that for the electroweak theory to make sense up to arbitrarily high energies, the symmetries on which it is based must survive quantum corrections.
  • Nature's greatest puzzles. SLAC Summer Institute 2004, p. 9.

• Each second, some 10¹⁴ neutrinos made in the Sun and about a thousand neutrinos made by cosmic rays in Earth's atmosphere pass through your body.
  • (2008). "Cosmic neutrinos". arXiv preprint arXiv:0802.0013. p. 1.

• Neither quarks nor leptons exhibit any structure on a scale of about 10^-16 cm, the currently attained resolution. We thus have no experimental reason but tradition to suspect that they are not the ultimate elementary particles. Accordingly, we idealize the quarks and leptons as pointlike particles, remembering that elementarity is subject to experimental test.
  • Gauge theories of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions. Princeton University Press. 2013. p. 2.