Members in the Media

“They wanted to eviscerate the book. … My first thought was, ‘This is so ridiculous I won’t even respond.’”
Kenneth W. Ford, reacting to the Department of Energy’s desire to redact portions of his memoirs about working on the hydrogen bomb, The New York Times, March 23, 2015.

“It’s beyond our imagination right now.”
Xiang Zhang, University of California, Berkeley, on the future of new applications for metamaterials, The New York Times, March 23, 2015.

“You know, we’ve probably got a reasonably good idea of what water is like and what ice is like. But when it gets near a surface, it becomes a different beast, and we don’t really understand it at all. … It’s quite interesting that even today we’re able to come up with new scenarios for water that we haven’t previously thought of.”
Alan Soper, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, on a new structure of ice found when sandwiched between two layers of graphene, NPR.org, March 25, 2015.

“We were having beers and thinking [about] what could we do that’s smaller scale, that we can handle ourselves. And while we were chatting … we were, of course, fiddling with our smart phones, and that’s when we realized, ‘Hold on a second, these smart phones can actually be used as particle detectors!’”
Daniel Whiteson, University of California, Irvine, on designing an app to detect cosmic rays, NPR.org, March 27, 2015.

“There’s a lot of science in art.”
Walter Massey, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, on his efforts to infuse more science into his school’s arts programs, The Chicago Tribune, March 30, 2015.

“You’d need the best equipment, and you’d need everything to go right, like landing in the exact right spot, but there’s no reason a car couldn’t parachute down and keep right on driving.”
Matthew Kleban, New York University, on the driving physics in the film “Furious 7,” The Chicago Tribune, April 4, 2015.

“This is not built upon trust. … This is built upon hard-nosed requirements in terms of limitations on what they do, at various timescales, and on the access and transparency.”
Ernest Moniz, U.S. Department of Energy, speaking to Congress about inspection requirements for Iran in the recently-agreed-upon nuclear framework, The New York Times, April 6, 2015.

“If people are learning and changing their behavior, then there must be something that’s changing in their brain. … The brain can’t be constant. It has to be changing in some way.”
Danielle Bassett, University of Pennsylvania, on how the brain learns new skills, The Chicago Tribune, April 6, 2015.

“My life story was published recently by Phillip Schewe with the title Maverick Genius: The Pioneering Odyssey of Freeman Dyson. I disapproved of his project and gave him no help. To my surprise, when the book appeared, I found out that he had done a good job. I apologized, and we remain friends.”
Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study, when asked who he would want to write his life story, The New York Times, April 16, 2015.

“We hope to see many, many more Higgs we can study in detail.”
Ulrich Heintz, Brown University, on the restart of the LHC, The New York Times, April 20, 2015.

“The ship was partially decontaminated, but some of the fission fragments are expected to be still bound to the ship.”
Kai Vetter, University of California, Berkeley, on the discovery of the sunken U.S.S. Independence, which was used in early atomic bomb tests, FoxNews.com, April 21, 2015.

“Hubble gave us beauty in a way that no other telescope had ever done.”
John Mather, NASA Goddard, on the 25th anniversary of the Hubble’s launch, The Washington Post, April 22, 2015.