46 quotes found
"Diversity is one of the high priorities that I expected everybody in the leadership position at the university to be committed to."
"American public universities have as their primary mission to provide excellent educational opportunities to the entire population and to serve the public good."
"American universities are united in the view that foreign students enhance the research and education that we provide. Our country can only benefit by welcoming international talent."
"The next revolution in scientific discovery will depend on scientific interdependence."
"It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience."
"“Which is Better: the Latke or the Hamantash?” is not a valid question, even though this has now been debated for 50 years. * The question does not exhibit the necessary property of universality. * It is culturally biased, implies gender specificity, exhibits geographical chauvinism and appeals to special interests. * It is not value-free. This question would not pass scrutiny on an SAT test, since it unfairly favors one ethnic and gender group over another: e.g., it favors the NY and Brooklyn establishment over the Midwest Rust Belt, and pits female latke workers against male hamantash bakers. In short, it is Politically Incorrect. Physics does not ask which is better: the proton or neutron, baryon or lepton, helium or neon, the conductor or insulator. These are simply properties of nature. Rather, physics asks: “Why?” or “Which is more important or more fundamental?” or “Who published it first?”"
"A scientist has the additional responsibility that comes with being a specialist: explaining science to the public, advising of its usefulness and benefits, and warning of its dangers and disadvantages. This is the responsibility of any specialist."
"To understand is to marvel. To marvel with understanding is to achieve the highest of intellectual states, to justify the triple raison d'être mentioned above: to be sensitive to theology, to aesthetics, and to science."
"We must nevertheless present all possible interpretations for each observation, so that competing theories can be formulated and defended. In science, as elsewhere, intellectual inertia, the fashions of the moment, the weight of institutions, and authoritarianism are always to be feared. Heresies play an essential role by keeping our minds argumentative and alert."
"These are the limits of the scientific method and of logic itself, insofar as they must rely on language. Our words are built on the objects of our experience. They have acquired their effectiveness by adapting themselves to the occurrences of our everyday world. But when we approach realities of another scale, these words can become obstacles."
"A certain ounce of arrogance is not essential in carrying forward an idea. In talking about the device with others, surprising now number of people who either were quite negative and had reasons to suggest it would not function as described or claimed that it would be of little interest and no better than some already existing device."
"The Nobel Prize in Physics 2009 was divided, one half awarded to Charles Kuen Kao "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication", the other half jointly to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor". He had no friends, and he was a nerd in school."
"We don't want support for scientific research just to keep scientists busy: we want scientists to be looked upon by the public as people who can do things for them that they can't do themselves."
"Could it be, nevertheless, that Einstein's theory is wrong? Might it be necessary to modify it—to find a new theory of gravity that can explain both the stronger gravity and the apparent antigravity being observed today—rather than simply throwing in invisible things to make the standard model work?"
"Almost 30 percent of the total matter-energy budget is said to be composed of so-called cold dark matter and almost 70 percent of "dark energy," leaving only about 4 percent as visible matter in the form of the atoms that make up the stars, planets, interstellar dust, and ourselves. Such is the degree of discrepancy between theory and observations today."
"When I was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1950s, Sir Isaac Newton's presence was still almost palpable."
"Einstein entertained counterintuitive notions that allowed him to pull physics from the mechanistic, clockwork universe of the eighteenth century up into the twentieth century."
"The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant had conjectured that Messier's nebulae were distant "island universes" outside our Milky Way galaxy, but many scientists in the early twentieth century disagreed."
"Today, like the elusive planet Vulcan in the nineteenth century, dark matter is accepted by the majority of astronomers and physicists as actually existing. Dark matter, although it has never been seen, is part of the generally accepted standard model of physics and cosmology, which also includes the big bang beginning of the universe."
"Hunting for elusive dark matter is now a multibillion dollar international scientific industry."
"It may be that ultimately the search for dark matter will turn out to be the most expensive and largest null result experiment since the Michelson-Morely experiment, which failed to detect the ether."
"It is hard to understand how this infinitely dense singularity can evaporate into nothing. For matter inside the black hole leak out into the universe requires that it travel faster than the speed of light."
"Is the reader feeling confused about the status of the black hole information paradox and black holes in general? So am I!"
"Experimentalists dream of some spectacular discovery such as the proof of the existence of black holes to justify the more than eight billion dollars it has cost to build the LHC."
"A much faster speed of light in the infant universe solved the horizon problem and therefore explained the overall smoothness of the temperatures of the CMB radiation, because light now traveled extremely quickly between all parts of the expanding but not inflating universe."
"Inflation itself proceeds at a speed faster than the measured speed of light."
"In estimating the amount of dark matter, cosmologists developing the standard model have to make some rather strong assumptions about their observations."
"One truth we have been able to count on concerning scientific persuit over the centuries has been that only testable theories survive the intense scrutiny of experimental science."
"To physicists such as myself, the huge amount of invisible dark matter needed to make Einstein's theory fit the astrophysical data is reason enough for exploring modified gravity theories."
"It is difficult to falsify the hypothesis of dark matter, because, as with Ptolemy's epicycles, true believers can always add additional arbitrary features and free parameters to overcome any conceivable difficulties that occur with the dark matter models."
"A large part of the relativity community is in denial - refusing even to contemplate the idea that black holes may not exist in nature, or seriously consider the idea that any kind of new matter such as the new putative dark energy can play a fundamental role in gravity theory."
"This is the only sure way I know to counter the anti-Copernican idea that the universe is accelerating in our epoch - to get rid of the problem entirely!"
"Indeed, there is a now a minority of cosmologists who question a beginning of the universe at all; instead they favor a cyclic model with a series of expansions and contractions."
"This is an extraordinary time in the history of science, in that we cannot only theorize about the beginning of the universe, but actually study the celestial fossils of how it happened."
"Giving up Einstein's theory of gravity is simply unacceptable to many in the community. It may take a new generation of physicists to view the evidence with unclouded eyes."
"We wondered if it was a prank. But then I knew it was the right day, and it would have been a cruel prank."
"Is that all, really? I thought there might have been more. We need to celebrate women physicists, because we’re out there. Hopefully, in time, it will start to move forward at a faster rate. I’m honoured to be one of those women."
"In high school, I was very good in math and physics. I wasn’t good at much of anything else. Some people are good at a lot of things. I don’t know how they choose what to do. I couldn’t do athletic stuff, I wasn’t artistic, I have no musical ear, and I wasn’t good at writing. So I was pretty narrow in what I could do. I wasn’t thinking, “Can I do science?” I was thinking, “That’s the only thing I can do, so let’s do it.""
"I never applied."
"If somebody else thinks something that you don't believe in, just think they're wrong and you're right and keep going. That's pretty much the way I always think."
"The n-point correlation functions have proved useful not only as descriptive statistics but also as dynamic variables in the Newtonian theory of the evolution of clustering. ... The functions are generalized to mass correlation functions in position and momentum, and the BBGKY hierarchy of equations for their evolution is derived. This yields a new way to analyze the evolution of mass clustering in an expanding universe."
"A solid stores energy in the vibrations of the atoms about their equilibrium positions. In the simplest approximation, which Einstein considered, each atom vibrates with the same frequency, ν, in each of three dimensions, so a solid containing N atoms can be thought of as 3N one-dimensional simple harmonic oscillators."
"Another somewhat confusing usage is the name "the big bang" for the standard model. It is not appropriate, because it connotes a spatially isolated event, an explosion, that marked the start of everything. ... But the name has a very evident appeal and I expect that people will continue to use it."
"I have been working in cosmology for 55 years ... I'm the last man standing, so to speak, from those early days."
"I don't think there is a final theory of anything. It's theories all the way down."
"Don't pay too much attention to that Nobel Prize. They have to be capricious — they have to be. And that means that people fully deserving the award don't get it."