APS News

June 2004 (Volume 13, Number 6)

Members in the Media

"I wore short skirts and had long, blond hair. People would say: 'You don't look like a physicist.' Well, what did they want me to do, grow a beard?"
—Helen Quinn, SLAC, on being a woman in physics, Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2004

"Who will be the next generation of scientists and engineers? How can we even discuss preparing for human exploration to the moon and Mars without discussing who will do the science to get us there?"
—Shirley Ann Jackson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, on women and minorities in physical science, Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2004


"There's still probably only 30 black women with physics PhDs in the whole country. But it's not just minorities. Whether they're black, brown, yellow, green, Americans just aren't going into physics."
—Arlene Maclin, Norfolk State University, Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2004


"Since ordinary sonoluminescence delivers so much energy at pressures of only one or two atmospheres, you could hope that at 1,000 atmospheres, you'd be in fusion territory- if the temperature also scaled up. But that's a really big 'if.' "
—Seth Putterman, UCLA, on sonofusion, Business Week, March 29, 2004


"You would never have thought it possible to pick up an atom and actually move it a few atomic diameters away. It is equivalent to reaching out to the planets and being able to touch a planet and move it from one orbit to another."
—Joseph Stroscio, NIST, on nanotech, CNN.com, April 15, 2004


"Anybody who does credit card transactions across the Internet- sorry, you've been had, because somebody will be listening and they just stole your credit card number."
—Carl Williams, NIST, on security problems quantum computers may cause, Dallas Morning News, April 26, 2004


"If there were no neutrinos, the sun and the stars wouldn't shine. There would be no Earth, no moon, no us. Without them, we wouldn't be here."
—Boris Kayser, Fermilab, Detroit Free Press, April 28, 2004


"Mainline fusion people were skeptical from the beginning. To be honest, support for cold fusion was mostly driven by the popular press."
—Thomas O'Neil, UCSD, The San Diego Union-Tribune, April 28, 2004


"Nobody understands string theory well enough to derive observational consequences."
—Steven Carlip, UC Davis, Christian Science Monitor, May 6, 2004


"A radiological weapon is not a weapon of mass destruction. It is primarily a weapon of economic and psychological disruption. After the panic from a dirty-bomb attack subsides, public refusal to return to contaminated urban areas could cause severe economic damage."
—Jaime Yassif, Federation of American Scientists, Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), May 3, 2004

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Editor: Alan Chodos
Associate Editor: Jennifer Ouellette

June 2004 (Volume 13, Number 6)

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Articles in this Issue
International Physics Community Joins Forces for 2005 World Conference in South Africa
Innovation Task Force Unveils New Advocacy Campaign
APS Council Approves Statements on Subordinates and on Referencing
APS Council Honors George Pake
Integral Looks at the Cosmos Through Gamma Glasses
QuarkNet Brings Research Experience to the Hight School Classroom
Laser Science, Quantum Optics Featured at 2004 CLEO/IQEC Conference
Senators Sign Letter Calling for More DOE Funding
Closing In on The Mysterious Dark Matter?
APS, AAPT Appoint Joint Task Force on Graduate Education
Two-Day Los Alamos Event to Honor Oppenheimer
Butterflies, Tornadoes, and Time Travel
Letters
The Back Page
Inside the Beltway: A Washington Analysis
Readers Bash Beltway Column
Members in the Media
This Month in Physics History
Zero Gravity: The Lighter Side of Science
Ask the Ethicist