Members in the Media

“The prize has been sitting on a shelf somewhere for the last 20 years. … I made a decision to sell it. It seems like a logical thing to do.”
Leon Lederman, retired from Fermilab, after putting his Nobel Prize medal up for auction, The Washington Post, May 27, 2015.

“Doing things the same way is not going to lead us to the breakthroughs we need.”
Catherine Foley, Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation, Canberra, on the need for diverse teams to produce great innovation and better involvement of talented females, The Sydney Morning Herald, May 29, 2015.

“I quit doing physics and got an apartment in Hollywood and started writing and got a really crappy job for a really crappy show, but I lived off writing for that show for a while, and it got better and I got an agent and a better show and just climbed my way up.”
Leonard Mlodinow, California Institute of Technology, on becoming a screenwriter for “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” businessinsider.com, June 4, 2015.

“This is truly a great honor. I just turned 80 and this is a wonderful, if unexpected, birthday present.”
Claudio Pellegrini, University of California, Los Angeles, on receiving the Enrico Fermi Award from the U.S. government, gazzettadelsud.it, June 11, 2015.

“The physics has been very carefully reviewed by experts and found to be accurate. The publication will encourage physics teachers to show the film in their classes to get across ideas about general relativity.”
David Jackson, Dickinson College, on research papers that resulted from black hole calculations done for the movie “Interstellar,” geeksnack.com, June 23, 2015.

“The sensors that guard DOD’s unclassified networks detected Russian hackers accessing one of our networks … [but a] crack team of incident responders quickly kicked them off the network.”
Ashton Carter, U.S. Secretary of Defense, on recent network break-ins, The New York Times, April 23, 2015.

“People point that out to me and say, ‘You know, Newton was religious.’ The point is — well, first of all, in that time the church was the National Science Foundation. It was the only place to get an education; it was the only place to fund research. But that’s fine. It is okay to have a relationship, but you grow up. Parents are useful for children, but the whole point is children grow up and move beyond their parents — we certainly hope that’s the case.”
Lawrence Krauss, Arizona State University, on whether the Bible should be included among books essential to sustain or rebuild civilization, salon.com, May 29, 2015.

“That means that the total energy involved had to be at least 6.4 x 1016 joules = about 18 billion kilowatt hours, and that’s only one part of a big storm system. This is why engineering the weather is a nonstarter!”
Douglas Natelson, Rice University, on the energy in a thunderstorm that passed the city of Houston, houstonchronicle.com, May 26, 2015.

“I don’t think that because I have a Ph.D., I’m in some upper echelon of society. I actually have a major problem with the elitism and the classism that goes on in academia. I think everyone has something to contribute. Everyone is precious in their own way. But I think it’s obvious that, structurally, American society has a persistent problem with recognizing not just Black people, but Black people as human beings who are just as deserving of the opportunity to think about big picture questions.”
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview on being the 63rd Black woman in American history to obtain a Ph.D. in a physics-related field, huffingtonpost.com, June 24, 2015.

“There are lots of people with resolutions to the paradox. Whether it’s the way physics actually works in our universe remains to be seen.”
Donald Marolf, University of California Santa Barbara, on recent proposals to view black holes as ‘fuzzballs’ to get around the ‘information paradox’,” quantamagazine.org, June 23, 2015.

“The hybrid monster in the movie is no Godzilla, but an intentionally designed beast from hell. As often happens in sci-fi, the story turns cautionary tale. How far are we prepared to push our technologies without, at the same time, weighing their moral consequences?”
Marcelo Gleiser, Dartmouth College, on the recently released movie “Jurassic World,” npr.org, June 23, 2015.

“We want to reboot physics — globally.”
Neil Turok, Perimeter Institute, Toronto, on the Institute’s Convergence conference, designed to keep physics from stalling in the aftermath of experimental discovery of the Higgs boson, The Globe and Mail, June 23, 2015.