Members in the Media

“Gaming had grown into a huge market. … There’s a huge push for performance, meaning you can buy low-cost, high-performance hardware very easily. I could go out and buy 100 PlayStation 3 consoles at my neighborhood Best Buy, if I wanted.”
Gaurav Khanna, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, on making a supercomputer out of dozens of videogame consoles, The New York Times, December 23, 2014.

“Faculty don’t like being told what to do, and there are people who push back and say they can figure it out on their own and they know what works for them. There’s plenty of data that says they’re mistaken.”
Noah Finkelstein, University of Colorado, Boulder, on universities overhauling the way physics and other sciences are taught, The New York Times, December 26, 2014.

“Doubling the energy will have a huge impact on the search for new particles at LHC. … The higher the energy, the heavier the particle one can possibly produce.”
Gabriella Sciolla, Brandeis Universit, FoxNews.com, December 29, 2014.

“By going to larger energies at the LHC, we increase the range of masses of potential dark matter particles that we can examine.”
Andrew Lankford, University of California, Irvine, FoxNews.com, December 29, 2014.

“One of the first things that you want to do when you discover a star system that’s got some orbiting planets is you want to understand the characteristics of the star that the planets are orbiting around. But if you don’t have the composition of the other stars correct, then mistakes will be made in inferring the properties of those other stars.”
James Bailey, Sandia National Laboratory, on using the Z-Machine to understand the makeup of stars, National Public Radio, December 30, 2014.

“That would really tear it up, and I’m guessing you would have a pretty big comet shower, potentially pretty disastrous.”
Adrian Melott, University of Kansas, on what would happen if a star passed nearby our solar system, NBCNews.com, December 31, 2014.

“We’re planning to resume our search for gravitational waves with Advanced LIGO in late summer or early fall 2015. … Hopefully, we’ll get some interesting results soon after!”
David Reitze, Caltech, The Los Angeles Times, December 31, 2014.

“I was reading about a faculty member studying black holes with x-rays. It sounded so cool and exciting and amazing. I worked for him in a summer and fell in love with the idea of building new telescopes and studying these objects. There’s an aspect of discovery that is wonderful. I got hooked on that.”
Fiona Harrison, Caltech, The Washington Post, January 6, 2015.

“[The report] confirms what I have often said — that the FBI’s definitive conclusions about the accuracy of their scientific findings in the Amerithrax case are not, in fact, definitive. The United States needs a comprehensive, independent review of the Amerithrax investigation to ensure we have learned the lessons from this bio attack.”
Rush Holt, former member of U.S. House of Representatives, on a report criticizing the FBI for its investigations into the 2001 anthrax attacks, The New York Times, December 11, 2014.

“It will be the greatest color movie of all time.”
Zeljko Ivezic, University of Washington, on the construction of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, The Washington Post, January 11, 2015.

“[W]e live in what we assert is a free country. So people ought to be able to say whatever they want. And we have a system of governance where there are people in Congress who represent some slice of the electorate. So if someone feels that way about science, what that tells me is that they’re capturing the sentiment of people in their electorate.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson, American Museum of Natural History, on Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) taking over as chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, The Boston Globe, January 13, 2015.