Members in the Media

“If either of these ice sheets were to disintegrate, it would destroy coastal civilization as we know it,”
Michael Oppenheimer, Princeton University, on the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets, Washington Post, July 16, 2007

“There are some things that chemistry can’t do on its own. The additional design flexibility with introducing structure as well as chemistry into the equation enables you to reach properties that just haven’t been accessible before.”
John Pendry, Imperial College London, on metamaterials, The New York Times, June 12, 2007

“I’m not crazy. I don’t know if this experiment will work, but I can’t see why it won’t. People are skeptical about this, but I think we can learn something, even if it fails.”
John Cramer, University of Washington, on a proposed time travel experiment, Seattle Post Intelligencerx;, June 11, 2007

“It’s a lot like looking for an ivory-billed woodpecker.”  
Dick Loveless, University of Wisconsin-Madison, on hunting for the Higgs particle, Wired, June 18, 2007

“The trouble is that rocks are made out of the same stuff as the fossils and the two are not always distinguishable.”
Jim Siegwarth, NIST, on a fossil hunt, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, June 24, 2007

“I’m doing fine; I’m doing wonderful considering it was just a week ago I got a new kidney. I had just turned 66, and I had just taken phased retirement, so this was a nice present.”
Chuck Brown, Fermilab, on receiving a new kidney, Kane County Chronicle, June 20, 2007

“The shock wave would have spread across the whole continent. This event was large enough to directly kill most everything instantly. Those that survived would have found their food sources devastated, their water polluted, all kinds of things that would have made it difficult to go on much longer.”
Richard Firestone, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, on the possibility that a comet may have killed off the wooly mammoths, Washington Post, June 11, 2007

“It’s hard to find anybody in fusion who didn’t want to save the planet.”
Christine Celata, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, on the potential for fusion power to serve as “peaceful power for the poor,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 2007

“Our view is we did the best we could and we didn’t come out on top, so our job is to support our colleagues in South Dakota now.”
Wick Haxton, University of Washington, on NSF’s decision to locate the deep underground laboratory at the Homestake Mine in South Dakota, Associated Press, July 11, 2007

“You can go over it with a truck and not break it–you will crumble the outside (of the shell) but not the (nacre) inside…If you understand how it forms, you could think of reproducing it ... a so-called ‘biomimetic’ material.”
Pupa Gilbert, University of Wisconsin-Madison, on studying the structure of mother-of-pearl (nacre), UPI, July 3, 2007

“There is no reason to believe our students are inherently unsafe going to that country. We should go. This should not be politics. The Iranian people are going to welcome us.”
Paul Stanley, Beloit College, on taking the US team to the International Physics Olympiad in Iran, channel3000.com, July 3, 2007

“It’s important to mentally engage students in what you’re teaching. We’re way too focused on facts and rote memorization and not on learning the process of doing science.”
Eric Mazur, Harvard University, The New York Times, July 17