"We think we know most of what exists in our local neighborhood, and there isn't anything which is a good candidate for producing these enormously high-energy particles. So it's a bit of a mystery where these are coming from."
— David Saltzberg, UCLA, on plans to use the moon as a high-energy neutrino detector, Space.com, May 14, 2001
"Pythagorean mathematics was based largely on deriving relations from whole numbers and using them to describe everything in the universe. To the Pythagoreans, the world order was a number and therefore the generation of a world order was the same as the generation of a number."
— Ian T. Durham, University of St. Andrews, on the origin of the cosmologies of Eddington, Dirac and Milne, Science News, May 26, 2001
"Imagine that you're in a boat lost at sea. You know that there is an island nearby, but you can't see it because it's just beyond the horizon. Now comes along a storm. Your boat starts to move up and down randomly in response to the waves, so occasionally your boat is high enough for you to look over the horizon and see palm trees. You have now detected, with the aid of the noise of the waves.the presence of this island."
— Frank Moss, University of Missouri, St. Louis, on how noise can help detect a signal, Discover Magazine, June 2001
"In this experiment, the pressure is the pressure oscillation that accompanies a sound wave. The experiment shows that helium can turn from the liquid state into the solid state very quickly, that is within one oscillation of the sound which is one-millionth of a second."
— Humphrey Maris, Brown University, UPI, June 4, 2001
".broken new ground in the way we're doing astronomy."
— Michael Turner, University of Chicago, on the discovery of the most distant quasar yet by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Dallas Morning News, June 6, 2001
"There is definitely a relationship there... If we can tighten that relationship, it should be a useful tool."
— Jim Lattimer, State University of New York at Stony Brook, on a plan to use a lead-208 nucleus as a surrogate for a neutron star, New Scientist, June 9, 2001
"Physicists in particular have lost a lot of clout, and they've even lost a lot of esteem in the public eye, and I think that's reflected in the fact that they're now being more ignored in their advice."
— David C. Cassidy, Hofstra University, on why the Bush administration pays so little attention to scientists, New York Times, June 17, 2001
"Not only are we not at the center of the universe, we aren't even made of the same stuff the universe is."
— Joel Primack, University of California, Santa Cruz, TIME Magazine, June 25, 2001
"Everybody thinks space-time should be an output rather than an input of a final theory."
— Nathan Seiberg, Institute for Advanced Study, New York Times, June 26, 2001
And finally, three quotes from ABC's Nightline, June 18, 2001, on the subject of neutrinos and the first results from the SNO detector:
"Baseballs become footballs because in the world of quantum mechanics that baseball always has a little bit of football in it."
— Art McDonald, SNO, giving a metaphorical explanation for neutrino oscillations
"We're putting on a pair of bifocals with these detectors. Now we'll be able to see near and far."
— Hamish Robertson, University of Washington, on new detectors his group will install at SNO
"All the evidence points to the fact that we are on a one-way trip, whether you like it or not."
— Neil De Grasse Tyson, American Museum of Natural History, on the accelerating expansion of the universe
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