Burton Richter Quotations

Modern science is fast-moving, and no laboratory can exist for long with a program based on old facilities. Innovation and renewal are required to keep a laboratory on the frontiers of science.

In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me.

Since stepping down as laboratory director in 1999, I have devoted an increasing fraction of my time to international issues. I am involved with energy, environment, and sustainability issues, particularly as they involve new energy sources free of greenhouse gases.

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 was born on 22 March 1931 in New York, the elder child of Abraham and Fanny Richter.

Innovation and renewal are required to keep a laboratory on the frontiers of science.

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

Getting enough energy to satisfy the needs of the developing world without bringing on an eco-disaster is not going to be easy. It will require a marriage of science and technology with good international policy, something that is always hard to bring off. We need to get it right this time.

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

Even before the ring at HEPL was operating, I had begun to think about a high-energy electron-positron colliding-beam machine and what one could do with it.

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.