Members in the Media

“When we just looked at the times — the boring question, basically — for some special problems, D-Wave was 10 times faster.... For other problems, D-Wave was 100 times slower.”
Matthias Troyer, ETH Zürich, on his research testing the quantum computing claims of the D-Wave company, The Washington Post, June 19, 2014.

“I said, the challenge is to do it without learning anything, and they said, what about what we call zero-knowledge proofs?... Personally, I just find it’s a fascinating and counterintuitive statement, that I can prove something is true without revealing why something is true.”
Alexander Glaser, Princeton University, on conceptually designing tests to look inside nuclear weapons without revealing their secret technology, Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2014.

“When the driving force was resonant with the [atom] cloud’s oscillation frequency, we achieved a sensitivity that is consistent with theoretical predictions and only a factor of four above the Standard Quantum Limit, the most sensitive measurement that can be made.”
Dan Stamper-Kurn, University of California, Berkeley, NBCNews.com, July 1, 2014.

“All we see is a blob in the sky, and inside this blob there is all sorts of stuff — various types of objects — that could be the source…. Now we know where to look.”
Gordon Thomson, The University of Utah, on discovering a hotspot of cosmic rays in the sky, The Christian Science Monitor, July 9, 2014.

“We can’t know everything. We can’t even know what ‘everything’ is or means. If there is a final truth out there, it’s beyond us. Science works under strict boundaries, and as hard as we may try, we can’t go beyond them. To know all answers, we need to start by knowing all questions. And that is simply impossible. Our view of the world will always be incomplete.”
Marcelo Gleiser, Dartmouth College, The Washington Post, July 14, 2014.

“It was more an afterthought than something central to the mission, but once they released the photos — it was part of the dawning of the environmental movement.”
Enrique Gomez, Western Carolina University, on getting NASA to release the Apollo-era photos for public consumption, USA Today, July 18, 2014.

“They have really done something very special.… It’s been very enabling of our research and that’s not a statement about dollars, that’s a statement about community.”
Charles M. Marcus, University of Copenhagen, on Microsoft underwriting research into quantum computing, The New York Times, June 23, 2014.

“The overarching theme here is that, out there at the frontiers of discovery, it’s very foggy.”
Michael Turner, The University of Chicago, on the controversy surrounding the BICEP2 results, The Washington Post, July 23, 2014.

“If this kind of thing happened all the time, it would give us a bad name.”
Katherine Freese, University of Michigan, on the controversy surrounding the BICEP2 results, The Washington Post, July 23, 2014.

“It’s about finding a way to control that bridge between the nanoparticles.… This level of control opens up a wide range of potential practical applications.”
Ventsislav Valev, Cambridge University, on using metamaterials to create a cloaking device, CBSNews.com, July 29, 2014.