Members in the Media

“As president, I'm responsible for them. Personally, I walked into a set of practices and lack of knowledge of the policies and as such, I feel that I got some bad advice. And I will fix it.”
—Robert Dynes, University of California president, on executive pay scandals at the University of California, Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2006

“This is a good example of something which is very counterintuitive that the laws of nature permit.”
—Robert Boyd, University of Rochester, on a method of making light travel backwards, The New York Times, May 16, 2006

“We were all scientists and therefore really understood and appreciated the value this would bring to our colleagues in Iraq,”
—Barrett Ripin, on the Iraqi Virtual Science Library, Washington Times, May 22, 2006

“No matter how zoomed in or out you are, you still see the same pattern.”
—Peter Pfeifer, University of Missouri, on fractals, St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 23, 2006

“The cage structures were not expected, because metal clusters tend to be more compact.”
—Lai-Sheng Wang, Washington State University, on a new cagelike configuration of 16 gold atoms, The New York Times, May 23, 2006

“The things I made, like nitroglycerin, took a fair amount of lab technique. I specialized in explosives because they were fun, and I liked doing things that got results in a hurry”
–Gordon Moore, on his childhood science experiments, Wired, June 2006

“There’s no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids – particularly boys – to science.”
—Roald Hoffmann, Cornell University, Wired, June 2006

“It's a quarry worth hunting.”
—Daniel Akerib, Case Western Reserve University, on dark matter, Knight Ridder Newspapers, June 5, 2006

“Golf club heads made of metallic glasses, for example, can make golf balls fly farther. While our research could be utilized by industry, it can actually help us understand any 'glassy' multi-particle system, such as the early universe–which cosmologists have described as a glass.”
—Sal Torquato, Princeton University, on glasses, United Press International, June 6, 2006

“Bringing DAMOP to Knoxville and to UT is a significant event. It is the top meeting in the field, and the opportunities available to the general public are outstanding."
—Joe Macek, University of Tennessee, the Oak Ridger, May 15, 2006

“I resolved that if I ever came back to Boston, I'd study its acoustics.”
—William Hartmann, Michigan State University, on his visit to the Mapparium, a whispering gallery in Boston, Christian Science Monitor, June 5, 2006

“A lot of times this stuff is presented as beautiful mathematics and all that. It can seem disconnected from reality. I wanted to make it clear that the speculation is drawn from experimental evidence, from observations. I want people to understand where these ideas come from, in a way that's entertaining and readable. I think many people enjoy the notion that there's more out there ... that we are still learning new things.”
—Lisa Randall, Harvard University, on why she wrote a popular book, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 29, 2006

“If their proposed test yields a positive result (finding small black holes), that would be fantastic. If it finds something, a new world opens up.”
—Raman Sundrum, Johns Hopkins University, on a proposal by Charles Keeton and Arlie Petters for detecting very small black holes, the San Francisco Chronicle,
June 9, 2006

“Is it science fiction? Well, it's theory and that already is not science fiction. It's theoretically possible to do all these Harry Potter things, but what's standing in the way is our engineering capabilities.”
—John Pendry, Imperial College London, on a theoretically possible invisibility cloak, Associated Press, May 26, 2006