Members in the Media

“My wife Naomi and I enjoy spending as much time as possible in the mountains, hiking and fly fishing, so hanging out with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, an avid outdoors person, in the national parks, national forests and wilderness areas would be outstanding.”
Ernest Moniz, the Department of Energy, The Washington Post, December 17, 2013

“We know that it cannot be the final word because it cannot even describe why a universe of matter survived if the Big Bang produced essentially equal amounts of antimatter and matter that should then have annihilated as the universe cooled.”
Gerald Gabrielse, Harvard University, on his recent experiment that measured the spherical nature of the electron, The Boston Globe, December 19, 2013

“That reflects the zeitgeist.… Everyone knows there is something big happening, and they’re trying find out what it is.”
Terry Sejnowski, the Salk Institute, on the popularity of courses teaching biologically inspired algorithms, The New York Times, December 29, 2013

“I had this huge to-do list with over a thousand things on it, and I found I wasn’t looking at it very often because whenever I did, I just got this depressing feeling of being overwhelmed by my failure to accomplish stuff….I learned that if I want Max to do something in December, I should think about December Max as a different person.”
Max Tegmark, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on prioritizing his new year’s resolutions, The Wall Street Journal, January 1, 2014

“Quantum computers are extremely delicate, so if you don’t protect them from their environment, then the computation will be useless.”
Daniel Lidar, University of Southern California, The Washington Post, January 2, 2014

“To be clear, there was essentially zero reason to believe that they were going to find any evidence for time travelers, but since it didn’t exactly cost a lot of money to perform the study I’m all in favor of it.”
Sean Carroll, Caltech, on the online search for time travellers, CNN.com, January 3, 2014

“This wasn’t a major research push….This was typing things into search engines. Billions of dollars are spent on time travel movies and books and stuff like that. This probably costs less than a dollar to check on it.”
Robert Nemiroff, Michigan Tech University, on his online search for any evidence of time travellers, The Associated Press, January 6, 2014

“There are not many things in our daily lives that we know to 1% accuracy. I now know the size of the universe better than I know the size of my house. Twenty years ago astronomers were arguing about estimates that differed by up to 50%. Five years ago, we’d refined that uncertainty to 5%; a year ago it was 2%. One percent accuracy will be the standard for a long time to come.”
David Schlegel, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, on recent measurements of the distances between galaxies, BBCNews.com, January 9, 2014

“It’s like there are 1,000 different particles emerging from all the wormholes, but in fact they’re all the same particle you sent in the beginning….You just have all these temporary copies emerging from and going back into these wormholes.”
Mark Wilde, Louisiana State University, on how a theoretical time machine could also clone objects, FoxNews.com, January 13, 2014

“That’s getting me back to a real love of my life….It gets me back to something I also feel passionate about.”
Robert Shelton, on leaving his position as executive director of the Fiesta Bowl to be president of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, The Associated Press, January 14, 2014

“We were watching these things [avalanches] go by…and we were running out of food. We began to get very depressed about it all.”
Irene Beardsley, recalling her 1978 ascent of the mountain Annapurna I in the Himalayas, The San Jose Mercury News, January 14, 2014