The Elegant Universe, NOVA Interview (2003)
“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. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/0502/0502070v1.pdf SLAC Summer Institute 2004, p. 9.
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Chris Quigg 4
American physicist 1944Related quotes
[Black holes and everyday physics, General relativity and gravitation, 14, 4, April 1982, 355–359, 10.1007/BF00756269]
“Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.”
Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything
"The Discovery of Asymptotic Freedom and the Emergence of QCD" http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2004/gross-lecture.html, Nobel Lecture, p. 79, nobelprize.org (2004)
"The confinement of quarks." https://www.jstor.org/stable/24950482?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents Scientific American 235, no. 5 (1976): 48–63.