Members in the Media

“Physicists tend to be super critical of strong conclusions, but the data on global warming now indicate the conclusions are not nearly strong enough.”
Leon Lederman, Fermilab, The Christian Science Monitor, March 11, 2010.

“The surprise was that we couldn’t find unpredictable people…We are all boring.”
Albert-Lάszló Barabási, Northeastern University, describing his work studying the patterns of people’s movements using their cell phone logs, AOL News, February 18, 2010.

“Arbitrarily closing the case on a Friday afternoon should not mean the end of this investigation,”
Rush Holt, House of Representatives, on the FBI ending its investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, The New York Times, February 19, 2010.

“I think Hollywood’s attitude will be, if we can make it more realistic without spoiling the story and without it costing too much more money, we will do it, but there are always those restraints,”
Sidney Perkowitz, Emory University, on trying to get more accurate science in Hollywood Movies, CNN.com, February 22, 2010.

“There’s nothing better today,”
Kip Thorne, Caltech, on videos from the 1950s he still uses to teach students fluid dynamics, The Atlantic, February 23, 2010.

“I was hiking up at Lake Tahoe in California and noticing the shapes of trees, and wondering, ‘Why do they have a given shape over another?"
Jeffrey Grossman, MIT, describing the inspiration for his new folded design for solar cells, MSNBC.com, February 25, 2010.

“By the time you get to 10 years, I’ve always felt it’s time to move on, do something else, do something fresh…The university’s in great shape, the board of trustees are very stable, the finances are in pretty good shape.”
Jack Wilson, University of Massachusetts, on stepping down from the presidency of the university, WBUR.org, March 1, 2010.

“It would be better if DOE just took this back.”
Arjun Makhijani, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, on drums of depleted uranium waste slated to be transferred from South Carolina to Utah, The Salt Lake Tribune, March 3, 2010.

“Wherever there is a battle over evolution now there is a secondary battle to diminish other hot-button issues like Big Bang and, increasingly, climate change. It is all about casting doubt on the veracity of science–to say it is just one view of the world, just another story, no better or more valid than fundamentalism.”
Lawrence Krauss, Arizona State University, The New York Times, March 4, 2010.

“By accelerating the gold (gold was selected because it is very heavy) at extremely high speeds, we were able to replicate the conditions right after the big bang…At a temperature of about 2 trillion degrees, which is about 100,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun, we were able to produce a new form of matter.”
Carl Gagliardi, Texas A&M, UPI, March 4, 2010.

“Deuterium is in sea water. The oceans of the world contain sixty billion year’s worth of deuterium. Tritium comes from lithium, lithium salts are in sea water.”
Steven Cowley, Culham Centre For Fusion Energy, BBCNews.com, March 5, 2010.

“I saw a marvelous BBC production of ‘Copenhagen,’ with really great actors who clearly didn’t understand physics…I doubt it was noticeable to anyone but a physicist, but there were one or two places where I said, ‘Ouch!’”
David Gross, University of California Santa Barbara, on portraying physicist Werner Heisenberg in a UCSB production of the play, Los Angeles Times, March 5, 2010.

“I’m used to standing in front of an audience but I’m telling my story and it’s my physics. It’s quite different getting inside of someone else.”
Alan Heeger, University of California Santa Barbara, on portraying physicist Niels Bohr in a UCSB production of “Copenhagen,” Los Angeles Times, March 5, 2010.

“We enter this process with no preconceived conclusions,”
Robbert Dijkgraaf, Universiteit van Amsterdam, after being named chair of a review board for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, The Associated Press, March 10, 2010.

“There is some advantage to encouraging people to think about the energy that a car or a home or a power plant involves…Whether it’s called the Rosenfeld or not doesn’t matter to me. I would never call it that myself–that’s immodest.”
Arthur Rosenfeld, California Energy Commission, on a unit of power savings being named after him, San Jose Mercury News, March 11, 2010.