Members in the Media

“Islands are special. They’re isolated from urban predators, and that includes people.’’
Ralph Nobles, on an island in San Francisco Bay that he thinks should be protected, San Francisco Chronicle, March 15, 2007 

“It seems a little unfair to the people whose last names begin with ‘W,’ doesn’t it?”
Stanley Whitcomb, Caltech, on listing the authors alphabetically on a paper by a large collaboration, Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2007

“There’s a tremendous amount of work building the apparatus, getting the experiment to work. But sitting there late at night in the lab, and knowing light is going at bicycle speed, and that nobody in the history of mankind has ever been here before–that is mind-boggling. It’s worth everything.”
Lene Hau, Harvard University, Boston Globe, March 17, 2007

“We’re not a charity. We’re not a poor small struggling school in the South that’s going to fail if you don’t give it money. I also make the case that not all black men are in danger of falling off a cliff.”
Walter Massey, Morehouse College, on raising money for the college, The New York Times, March 28, 2007

“That is based on the assumption that nobody can crack it in time. There is no proof of it. You can only hope [it doesn’t happen].”
Wolfgang Tittel, University of Calgary, explaining that current data security measures rely on the fact that computers are not fast enough to decode information, The Globe and Mail, April 3, 2007

“The glass bulb would be red-hot in the flame, and then they’d take the tube out of their mouth for a moment and the thing would go, ‘woooo,’ It would just sing to them.”
Greg Swift, Los Alamos National Lab, on an observation by 19th century glassblowers, Associated Press, April 2, 2007

 “When you pay for your children, you send them to school; you pay a lot of money for them. You never expect that tomorrow they will pay you back and you will get some return. I think the attitude of the general public to physics should be like the attitude of parents to children. We do it for the future.”
Yuri Kamyshkov, University of Tennessee, on why the public should fund physics, Black Hills Pioneer, March 23, 2007

“The Iditarod bug didn’t bite me. It swallowed me whole.”
Eric Rogers, on running the Iditarod, Anchorage Daily News, March 17, 2007

“We took a pratfall on the world stage. What the analysis shows so far is that something extraordinarily simple was missed in the design: the obvious imbalance of axial forces that can occur.”
Pier Oddone, Fermilab, on the failure of a magnet built at Fermilab for the LHC, Associated Press, April 3, 2007