Members in the Media

“Physics is a true canary in the mine, so to speak, of judging America’s capabilities in terms of science… If you let physics go, it’s symptomatic of the fact that something has eroded in the intellectual capacity of academic institutions.”
Carlos Handy, Texas Southern University, on proposed program cuts throughout the public universities of Texas, The New York Times, September 15, 2011.

“Until now, most faculty members thought their role was to do research and teach courses they were assigned…Now, researchers at institutions in Texas are going to have to take responsibility for students graduating successfully.”
Michael Marder, University of Texas at Austin, on proposed program cuts throughout the public universities of Texas, UPI, September 26, 2011.

“This is ridiculous what they’re putting out… Until this is verified by another group, it’s flying carpets.”
Drew Baden, University of Maryland, on faster than light neutrinos, The Associated Press, September 23, 2011.

“If it’s correct, it’s phenomenal… We’d be looking at a whole new set of rules.”
Robert Plunkett, Fermilab, on OPERA’s claim of faster than light neutrinos, The Washington Post, September 23, 2011.

“Probably not. But Maybe! Or in other words: science as usual.”
Sean Carroll, Caltech, quoted from his blog post talking about whether neutrinos really do travel faster than the speed of light, USAToday.com, October 9, 2011.

“I don’t think you’re going to ever kill Einstein’s theory. You can’t. It works.”
Alan Kostelecký, Indiana University, on OPERA’s faster than light neutrino claims, The Associated Press, September 23, 2011.

“There were all these wizards walking around, which was exciting for someone who didn’t get to get his hands on anything… There’s no way the LHC exists without the Tevatron.”
Christopher Quigg, Fermilab, reflecting on the technical wizardry that went into building the Tevatron, The Washington Post, September 29, 2011.

“High energy physics in the States has never fully recovered from the loss of the SSC.”
Roy Schwitters, University of Texas, The Washington Post, September 29, 2011.

“The idea is to look for things that happen very rarely, and the way to find them is to create lots of examples and see if you find something.”
Steve Holmes, Fermilab, on the future of the laboratory at the intensity frontier, CBSNews.com, September 29, 2011.

“It was a very interesting machine to work on in the first place, because we knew we were building something that had never been built before… It definitely has a personality, and that started right away.”
Roger Dixon, Fermilab, reminiscing about the Tevatron, NPR, September 30, 2011.

“Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed, because dark energy has no effect on daily life, or even inside our solar system…We know there is gravity because apples fall from trees. We can observe gravity in daily life. If we could throw an apple to the edge of the universe, we would observe it accelerating. Until the 1990s, there were few reliable observations about movement at the scale of the entire universe, which is the only scale dark energy affects. So dark energy could not be seen until we could measure things very, very far away.”
Adam Riess, Johns Hopkins, The Atlantic, October 4, 2011.

“Which of course is the only reason to win a Nobel Prize, to be able to park on campus.”
Saul Perlmutter, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, on the perks of winning a Nobel Prize, The Associated Press, October 4, 2011.