Members in the Media

“You can fit a million of these crystals on the end of a human hair.”
John Lindl, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, on a new form of manmade diamond, Tri-Valley Herald, November 10, 2006

 “I like the bad ones as much as the good. How can you know beautiful if you don’t know ugly?”
George Bissinger, East Carolina University, trying to develop a guide to which features of a violin determine the qualities of a violin’s sound, The New York Times, November 28, 2006

 “To give you a rough idea, when you have this huge amount of intensity, within the volume of a single atom, there are thousands of photons knocking at a single atom at the same time. So this is a very violent, wild process.”
Chunlei Guo, University of Rochester, on his method of using a femtosecond laser to turn metals truly black, Toronto Star, November 26, 2006

“If you watch that clock for 300 billion years, the error would be one second.”
Louis DiMauro, Ohio State University, on a new atomic clock, Columbus Dispatch, December 4, 2006

 “What they’ll be looking for is radioactive contaminants made at the same time. They’ll do the best they can technically. But my guess is that it will take an informant.”
William Happer, Princeton University, on the efforts to track down the origin of the polonium-210 used to poison Alexander Litvinenko, New York Times, December 3, 2006

“It's good to have such an enthusiast like Griffin at NASA, but that whole messianic vision is pretty far from the current state of technology. Many of us worry that it will suck the juice out of other very promising projects to learn more about our universe.”
Robert Kirshner, Harvard University, on NASA’s vision for space exploration, Washington Post, December 4, 2006

“It's kind of funny. No two grains of sand are exactly alike, either. But nobody cares about that.”
Kenneth Libbrecht, Caltech, on snowflakes, Chicago Sun-Times, December 1, 2006