Members in the Media

“Most every problem you can imagine has been solved by nature. Nature got there first. All that is left is to rationalize nature’s designs, many of which are remarkably subtle.”
John Bush, MIT, Boston Globe, May 19, 2008

“Nature has simple ways of making structures and materials that are still unobtainable with our million-dollar instruments and engineering strategies.”
Michael Bartl, University of Utah, on a beetle whose scales are photonic crystals, The Salt Lake Tribune, May 23, 2008

“He really changed our concept of how space and time are put together.”  
William H. Wing, University of Arizona, in an obituary for Willis Lamb, Washington Post, May 19, 2008

“The discovery of dark energy has greatly changed how we think about the laws of nature.”
Edward Witten, Institute for Advanced Study, The New York Times, June 3, 2008

“We caught the whole thing on tape, so to speak. I truly won the astronomy lottery. A star in the galaxy exploded right in front of my eyes.”
Alicia Soderberg, Princeton University, on discovering a supernova as it was beginning to explode, The New York Times, May 22, 2008

“If you’re wearing gold jewelry, it came from a supernova explosion.”
Robert Kirshner, Harvard University, The New York Times, May 22, 2008

“Because we see this extra effect, we can either blame it on the left-hand side of the equation and say we don’t understand gravity, or we can blame it on the right-hand side and say there’s this extra stuff.”
Adam Riess, Johns Hopkins University, on dark energy, National Geographic News, May 16, 2008

“We’re motivated by the physics questions we’re trying to answer, and we’re willing to move heaven and Earth to get the experiment built to answer these fundamental questions about the universe.”
Paul Padley, Rice University, on the LHC, The Houston Chronicle, May 25, 2008

“Still, it’s incredibly hard for Americans to be effective on a European experiment.”
David Toback, Texas A&M University, on the LHC, The Houston Chronicle, May 25, 2008

“Congress had to have some symbol of fiscal restraint, and we were it,”
Roy Schwitters, University of Texas, on the cancellation of the SSC, The Houston Chronicle, May 25, 2008

“The specific experience you get doing that stuff doesn’t have applications outside that narrow world. It’s not obvious that I will be able to be fully employed.”
Ken Sale, a nuclear weapons expert who was recently laid off from Lawrence Livermore Lab, The Associated Press, June 3, 2008

“These results strongly imply that no more than 4 percent of the pulsar’s energy loss is due to gravitational radiation.”  
Michael Landry, LIGO, on new data from the Crab Pulsar, Tri City Herald, June 3, 2008

“Looking out of the Milky Way, we can see some supernova explosions with optical telescopes across half of the Universe, but when they’re in this murk, we can miss them in our own cosmic backyard.”
Stephen Reynolds, North Carolina State University, on the discovery of the youngest supernova in the Milky Way, Reuters, May 14, 2008