Members in the Media

“If the world wants to do this science, then the world should organize, with Fermilab as the host, to solve the problems and make it happen.”
Steven Ritz, Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, on the P5 report’s recommendation on internationalizing the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment, NBCNews.com, May 21, 2014.

“What CERN did for the Higgs boson, we want to do with the neutrino.”
Joe Lykken, Fermilab, on future neutrino experiments outlined in the P5 report, The Associated Press, May 21, 2014.

“Nobel prizes were predicted and scores of theoretical models spawned. The announcement also influenced decisions about academic appointments and the rejections of papers and grants. It even had a role in governmental planning of large-scale projects.”
Paul Steinhardt, Princeton University, on the BICEP2 controversy, PBS News Hour, June 4, 2014.

“I believe that the scrutiny the BICEP2 results have received indicates what an exciting discovery this will be, if confirmed…. Personally, I am looking forward to the information from Planck and other measurements that will hopefully shed light on whether we really have found a Rosetta Stone from the early universe, or simply some unexpected interstellar dirt.”
Marc Kamionkowski, Johns Hopkins University, on the BICEP2 controversy, PBS News Hour, June 4, 2014.

“We actually have some evidence of what happens when a high technological culture meets a low-technology culture…. Our species bears this out multiple times in the history books, and it doesn’t bode well for the culture that has less technology. But I would say to fear an alien for that reason is more a reflection of how we know we treat each other than it is on how we could ever possibly suspect an alien to treat us. And so why should we be the measure of hatred in the universe?”
Neil deGrasse Tyson, American Museum of Natural History, on alien invasions, The Washington Post, June 5, 2014.

“They want to bulldoze it, which is really atrocious to me…. It’s like burning the Alexandria Library.”
Dennis Papadopoulos, the University of Maryland, on the plan to demolish the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Alaska, National Public Radio, June 10, 2014.

“To throw the ball that hard and that quickly (after all, he didn’t have time to ‘aim’) with that accuracy is truly an amazing feat. Everyone who has seen the throw knows that already, but now we’ve quantified exactly how amazing it was.”
Alan Nathan, University of Illinois, analyzing an out made by Oakland A’s fielder Yoenis Cespedes on June 10, The Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2014.

“At these twinning boundaries, the crystals on each side are bonding together much better.”
Bo Xu, Yanshan University in China, on creating a new class of diamond structure stronger than any previous natural or synthetic diamond, The Los Angeles Times, June 11, 2014.

“The result of such an attempt will be broken teeth of the fork.”
Natalia Dubrovinskaia, the University of Bayreuth in Germany, sharing her concerns about Xu’s method of determining his diamonds’ strength by comparing it to testing a steel knife by pressing it against an aluminum fork, The Los Angeles Times, June 11, 2014.

“Seven years, I can wait that long…. I’ve had a good career, but I’ll be a lot happier if I can see a break-even fusion device before I kick off.”
Nicholas Krall, on consulting with the EMC2 Fusion company, NBCNews.com, June 13, 2014.

“If you’re going to rely on that as an operational system, one shouldn’t be too surprised that it does tend to fail more than you’d like.”
Dean A. Wilkening, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, on the shortcomings of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense missile defense system, The Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2014.

“[T]he tunneling process becomes slower and slower the farther the atoms have to hop. This does not bode well for scaling such interaction-shifted tunneling resonances to a larger number of lattice sites…. Fortunately, developing intuition for the quantum dynamics of even five or six particles is already exciting and important.”
Jonathan Simon, a physicist at the University of Chicago, on the applications of newly developed quantum tunneling system, FoxNews.com, June 18, 2104.