‘’There is usually enough random energy around to create disorder. This random energy can be a breeze or a vibration, but often it takes the form of a child, spouse or pet.’’
—Lawrence Brehm, SUNY Potsdam, using entropy to explain why objects like pens often get lost, New York Daily News, May 1, 2005
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“Our hope is that when scientists realize fusion can be scaled down and self-contained, that it generates a lot of new ideas.”
—Seth Putterman, UCLA, on the small nuclear fusion device he built, USA Today, April 28, 2005
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“What Putterman’s made is an amazing little accelerator. It’s a version of that that doesn’t need any high voltage.”
—Will Happer, Princeton University, on Putterman’s device, The New York Times, April 28, 2005
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“Anytime you’re measuring something to 20 decimal places, you’re pretty cutting-edge.”
—Bruce Allen, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, on the LIGO gravitational wave detector, Baltimore Sun, April 22, 2005
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“It just goes to show how much smaller the world has become now, how we can communicate so easily and efficiently, which was a luxury that people didn’t have back in Einstein’s time.”
—Adrian Liu, Princeton University, on the “light around the world” relay, Princeton Packet, April 22, 2005
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“Until his day, people were tied to this idea of time as being fixed. Einstein took an operational viewpoint that time is what clocks measure and nothing more.”
—Clifford Will, Washington University, National Geographic online, April 15, 2005
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“I found at Jones High a vibrant community. In fact, my roots in doing science can be traced back to Jones High.”
—Jim Gates, University of Maryland, on the segregated high school he attended, Orlando Sentinel, May 1, 2005
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“I think it’s just possible that we live in a city of brilliant young women.”
—Eric Cornell, JILA/University of Colorado, on the election of two Boulder women to the National Academy of Sciences, Rocky Mountain News, May 4, 2005
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