Members in the Media

"If Los Alamos really was a bunch of arrogant. cowboys, they would appear to have a safety record and incidents safety violations twice as high as anyplace else or, you know, way out of the statistical clouds, and that wasn't the case."
—Brad Holian, Los Alamos National Laboratory, on safety and security at LANL, National Public Radio (NPR), September 20, 2004

"Usually when people cite a work, it's because they found it useful. I'd say that this is something that I'd want to list among my major achievements."
—John Perdew, Tulane University, on having written the world's most cited physics paper, Times-Picayune (New Orleans), September 20, 2004

"I'm sitting in my kitchen looking at this large collection of cells put together into this amazing thing called a cat. What is the difference between a cat and a crystal of salt, which also is the product of self-assembly?"
—George Whitesides, Harvard University, on self-assembly, Dallas Morning News, September 5, 2004

"The Telescope Array experiment is meant to help solve the puzzle of the origins of ultra-high-energy cosmic radiation. We don't know where they are coming from. We don't know why they are here."
—Pierre Sokolsky, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, on cosmic rays, Knight Ridder Newspapers, August 30, 2004

"There was a big pit in my stomach. This just wasn't supposed to happen. We're going to have a lot of work picking up the pieces."
—Roger Wiens, Los Alamos National Laboratory, on the crash of the Genesis space capsule, Associated Press, September 8, 2004

"The science fiction aspect ... is not enough to justify doing this, but it doesn't hurt."
—Jeffrey Hangst, CERN, on producing anti-atoms, The Dallas Morning News, September 19, 2004

Two quotes from Russell Hulse in the Dallas Morning News, September 19, 2004:

"My first reaction was not 'Eureka!,' but rather 'Nuts, what's wrong?' "
(on his discovery of a pair of pulsars orbiting each other)  

"Science was never a career to me, but a way of life. If you can give that to kids, it's a wonderful gift."

"I wondered why hasn't anyone written a book about the science of football. It seemed to me that was odd because there's every bit as much physics in football as in baseball."
—Timothy Gay, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, on the physics of football, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 4, 2004

"For people like me that choose to work in this field, enhancing our knowledge is the payoff. And these scientific breakthroughs are really our payoff, and everybody that does basic research does it because it's a lot of fun."
—Deborah Jin, NIST, National Public Radio (NPR), September 28, 2004

"The theorists will be surprised, but they do not exclude such a possibility."
—Moses H. W. Chan, Penn State, on having produced supersolid helium, The New York Times, September 21, 2004

"I have written at least one paper in the remote past about the possibility of supersolid behavior. I would have bet at least 100 to 1 against it."
—Anthony Leggett, University of Illinois, on supersolid helium, The New York Times, September 21, 2004

Quotes about the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics:

"I was in the shower. I hadn't slept all night because I was just too nervous. And my wife answered the phone. I stepped out of the shower soaking wet, and I started listening to the people congratulating me. It was lovely. Then I called up my parents right away."
—Frank Wilczek, MIT, on receiving the phone call informing him he'd won the Nobel Prize, NPR, October 5, 2004

"One of my colleagues at the time said, 'David, this is a great thing you've come up with, and a great theory, but it will never be proven.'"
—David Gross, University of California, Santa Barbara, Washington Post, October 6, 2004

"What they provided us was a lovely insight, and a surprising one, into the fundamental nature of matter,"
—Sylvester James Gates, University of Maryland, USA Today, October 6, 2004

"It sorted out our ideas on how all of the nuclear matter is held together and how the protons and neutrons are built. And it's as beautiful a theory as exists, and that includes electrodynamics, gravity, anything you want to mention."
—James Bjorken, Stanford University, (NPR), October 5, 2004

"The history of understanding matter is taking things apart. How could it be that they are made of quarks and you can't get them out? It was a deep conundrum."
—Michael Turner, NSF, Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2004

"How often do you get to explain one of the four fundamental forces of nature?''
—Lawrence Krauss, CWRU, New York Times, October 6, 2004