Members in the Media

"If one were hunting for gold, this would be the map of where not to dig."
-Maria Spiropulu, on results of a search for supersymmetric particles at Fermilab, New York Times, February 5, 2002.

"We literally spray the liquid lithium on the walls and then it flows through a bottom drain."
-Robert Kaita, Princeton University, on building a fusion reactor with liquid metal walls, ABCnews.com, February 5, 2002.

"The change in friction you get is equivalent to going from being on ice to dry pavement."
-Victor Petrenko, Dartmouth College, on electronic brakes built into skis and snowboards, New Scientist, February 6, 2002.

"Water is one of the strangest substances on earth. It has a myriad of properties that make it unique for life and unique for how a ski slides on snow. It's often impossible to predict."
-David Lind, University of Colorado, on the physics of skiing, ABCnews.com, February 8, 2002.

"The mission proposal is completely new. The idea extends an existing mission concept - the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna or LISA - to much higher sensitivity and into a different frequency range."
-Neil Cornish, Montana State University, on plans to measure gravitational shock waves from the big bang, UPI, February 12, 2002.

"You should aim to flip the pancake into the air at a speed of 10 miles an hour, which will mean it will take less than .5 of a second to reach the top of its trajectory. If you are lucky, the pancake should now have rotated 90 degrees, at a rate of .55 revs per second. If not, you could be in trouble and have a sticky mass of flying batter spinning through the air."
-Garry Tungate, Birmingham University, Belfast News Letter, February 12, 2002.

"At the end, you realize most of what you've got in your hand is 75 percent air. This tiny sheet of paper, which has not much strength at all, is able to resist your squeezing very, very well. Why is it as strong as it is?"
-Sidney R. Nagel, University of Chicago, on the physics of crumpling, New York Times, February 19, 2002.

"A number of very clever people have been chipping away at the problem and I think now we can answer: yes, it would be very difficult but it should be possible without breaking the laws of physics to send probes to the nearest stars."
-Geoffrey Landis, NASA, The Independent (London), February 16, 2002.

"It is based on the idea that for a short period of time, energy and value of money is conserved. The value of money is conserved when there are transitions between currencies."
-Amador Muriel, Data Transport Systems, on predicting the short term behavior of currencies, Business World (Philippines), February 14, 2002.

" If the people in the treasurer's office, and their consultants, had been doing the kind of thorough investigating that they claimed to do before investing in anything, then they should have uncovered that there was something wrong in Enron's books, which we now all know."
-Charles Schwartz, University of California, Berkeley, News Hour with Jim Lehrer, February 19, 2002.

"We know how to make metals that have strength. But we have never been able before to predict whether an alloy, for example, would get stronger and better. This technique will allow us to tailor the strength of materials and take years off the development process because we won't have to rely on trial-and-error."
-Bennett Larson, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, on a new technique for making 3-D images of small samples, UPI, February 20, 2002.

"I believe we have made cold anti-matter atoms... but I can't really prove it."
-Gerald Gabrielse, Harvard University, on experiments at CERN to create anti- hydrogen, Sydney Morning Herald, February 22, 2002.

"I still cannot recover, right now even. Sometimes I think it's a kind of nightmare."
-Yoji Totsuka, University of Tokyo, on the disastrous implosion of phototubes at the Superkamiokande facility, Daily Yomiuri, February 26, 2002.

"Recognizing the limitations in the budget the department faces, I'll work with the scientific community and Congress to establish priorities and them champion them within the department."
-Ray Orbach, new Director of the Department of Energy's Office of Science, UPI, February 26, 2002.

"There's going to be a great deal of skepticism about this, and there should be. We don't know whether it will work or not."
-John B. Rundle, University of Colorado, on a new way of predicting earthquakes, Los Angeles Times, February 28, 2002.