APS News

June 2011 (Volume 20, Number 6)

Members in the Media

“We will not discover dark matter today…We will be doing this again and again.”
Elena Aprile, Columbia University, after an initial null result from the XENON Dark Matter Project in Gran Sasso, Italy, The New York Times, April 13, 2011.

“We’re very, very close… We can’t say for sure how long it is going to take to get there. My best guess is four years, maybe five.”
Edward Stone, Caltech, on the Voyager 1 spacecraft approaching the edge of the solar system, The Ottawa Citizen, April 21, 2011

“It is actually quite illegitimate and unscientific to talk publicly about internal collaboration material before it is approved… So this ‘result’ is not a result until the collaboration officially releases it.”
Sheldon Stone, Syracuse University, on the leaked memo hinting at the detection of the Higgs boson, MSNBC.com, April 22, 2011.

“Don’t worry, Higgs boson! I would never spread scurrilous rumors about you. Unlike some people.”
Sean Carroll, Caltech, on the leaked memo hinting at the detection of the Higgs boson, MSNBC.com, April 22, 2011.

“We’ve got 3,000 physicists spread across the world. Everyone’s working away, trying to find something new. Every day, there’s bound to be someone around the world who thinks they’ve got something… There’s nothing anybody in the collaboration can or should be saying about this particular rumour.”
Robert Orr, University of Toronto, on the leaked memo hinting at the detection of the Higgs boson, The Globe and Mail, April 24, 2011.

“She didn’t just happen on this, she’s been pushing hard on the data sets and pushing to understand the simulations for quite a while.”
Robert Roser, Fermilab, on a leaked memo by Sau Lan Wu’s team at CERN which hints at a possible detection of the Higgs boson, FoxNews.com, April 25, 2011.

‘’Our society squanders vast sums on trivia and entertainment, yet cannot find some small change to address the burning issue of whether we are alone in the universe.’’
Paul Davies, Arizona State University, on the shuttering of SETI’s new telescope array because of budget constraints, The Sydney Morning Herald, April 28, 2011.

“I think the AMS will be a great uplift for American particle physics.”
Ulrich Becker, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the launch of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on board the Space Shuttle Endeavour, Washington Post, Apri1 28, 2011.

“In the last 30 years, [physicists] were trying to make our theories more complicated by introducing more particles, more dimensions… We decided to go the other way and make theories less complicated in the high energy realm. At high energy [in the early universe], we are changing the background on which the standard model of particle physics is formulated. In 1-D, the problem greatly simplifies.”
Dejan Stojkovic, University of Buffalo, MSNBC.com, April 28, 2011.

“What we are learning by comparing the new materials with the older ones is that these quasi-localized spins and the interactions among them are crucial for superconductivity, and that’s a lesson that can be potentially applied to tell experimentalists what is good for raising the transition temperature in new families of compounds.”
Jian-Xin Zhu, Los Alamos National Laboratory, U.S. News and World Report, May 5, 2011.

“We have to deal with our centralized power sources first… This is not an assignment for the next few decades.”
Robert Socolow, Princeton, on the efficiency of removing carbon dioxide from air versus from centralized sources like power stations, The New York Times, May 9, 2011.

“He’s got the scientific chops.”
Robert Beichner, North Carolina State University, on Nobelist Carl Wieman’s study on effective teaching strategies, The Associated Press, May 13, 2011.

“Physicists will never cease testing their basic theories, whether in order to confirm them better or in order to reveal new physics beyond those standard theories. In some realms the only place to do this, to carry out such experiments, is in space. This was the case with [Gravity Probe-B].”
Clifford Will, Washington University in St. Louis, BBCNews.com, May 14, 2011.

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Editor: Alan Chodos

June 2011 (Volume 20, Number 6)

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Articles in this Issue
New Topical Group on Climate Actively Seeks Members
New APS Online Journal Issues Call for Papers
Assessment Casts Doubt on Utility of Direct Air Capture of CO2
Physics Contributes to New Medical Imaging Technique
Four Funded Sites Join APS Teacher Education Project
Quasars Help Researchers See in 3-D
Neutrinos Can Monitor Changes in Reactor Fuel
Japanese Physics Undergoes a Slow Recovery
Letters to the Editors
The Back Page
Members in the Media
This Month in Physics History
Washington Dispatch
Zero Gravity: The Lighter Side of Science
International News