Nobel Laureates From The United States

"Wineland and Haroche realized a long-standing dream of quantum physics: studying the behavior of single quantum objects. The founders of quantum mechanics believed that studying a single quantum system, like a single atom or a single photon, was beyond the realm of experimental possibility. Many believed that it did not even make sense to talk about a single atom; only the behavior of an ensemble could be meaningful. In fact, Schrödinger asserted: “…we never experiment with just one electron or atom ... In thought experiments, we sometimes assume that we do; this invariably entails ridiculous consequences…” ... The groups of Haroche and Wineland turned this idea on its head; not only did they use individual atoms and photons to elucidate some of the strangest aspects of quantum mechanics, they have even used them to make practical devices."

"The idea of magnetic trapping is that in a magnetic field, an atom with a magnetic moment will have quantum states whose magnetic or Zeeman energy increases with increasing field and states whose energy decreases, depending on the orientation of the moment compared to the field. The increasing-energy states, or low-field-seekers, can be trapped in a magnetic field configuration having a point where the magnitude of the field is a relative minimum. [No dc field can have a relative maximum in free space (Wing, 1984), so high-field-seekers cannot be trapped.] The requirement for stable trapping, besides the kinetic energy of the atom being low enough, is that the magnetic moment move adiabatically in the field. That is, the orientation of the magnetic moment with respect to the field should not change."

"While in high school, I spent a summer working in a university research lab. The graduate student who mentored me shared this insight: physicists are people who get paid for working at their hobby. For me, that has been a joyous truth. Physicists don’t get paid much, but we sure have a lot of fun. And so, my first wish for you is that, whatever you do, you will work at something you love."

"I think a lot people had this idea that science advances through eureka moments and it's true to some extent. But my experience has been that it's a lot of really hard work, where finally you have figured out what's going on and you can then move on to the next stage."

"Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer."

"One of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing."

"A poet fascinated with border states between existence and nonexistence."

"(You once said to me on the phone, “Follow your enthusiasms.”) I believe that. I used to be approached in classes by women who felt they shouldn’t have children because children were too distracting, or would eat up the vital energies from which art comes. But you have to live your life if you’re going to do original work. Your work will come out of an authentic life, and if you suppress all of your most passionate impulses in the service of an art that has not yet declared itself, you’re making a terrible mistake. When I was young I led the life I thought writers were supposed to lead, in which you repudiate the world, ostentatiously consecrating all of your energies to the task of making art. I just sat in Provincetown at a desk and it was ghastly—the more I sat there not writing the more I thought that I just hadn’t given up the world enough. After two years of that, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be a writer. So I took a teaching job in Vermont, though I had spent my life till that point thinking that real poets don’t teach. But I took this job, and the minute I started teaching—the minute I had obligations in the world—I started to write again."

"She was in my poetry seminar at Columbia and I felt that then her poetry was tremendously involved with a kind of female anger but also victimization which I think is something that really has to come out in poetry, but it's not primarily what I would hope to find in women's poems in the future. I'd like to find something much more complicated and dense. But I think there's going to be a lot of that anger in poetry and some of it will be very powerful poetry."

"My bed usually looks like Proust’s bed; my whole life is lived there."

"When I’m trying to put a poem or a book together, I feel like a tracker in the forest following a scent, tracking only step to step. It’s not as though I have plot elements grafted onto the walls elaborating themselves. Of course, I have no idea what I’m tracking, only the conviction that I’ll know it when I see it."

"We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory."

"There is something "disembodied, triumphant, dead"—Whitman's words—about Glück's usual voice [...]. She sees experience from very far off, almost through the wrong end of a telescope, transparently removed in space or time."

"The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams."

"It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment—the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It's like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away."

"From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved."

"Don’t prejudge your stimuli. Just trust where your attention goes."

"Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface.It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth."

"The poem will not survive on content but through voice. By voice I mean the style of thought, for which a style of speech never convincingly substitutes."

"I’m an opportunist—I always hope I’ll get material out of any activity. I never know where writing is going to come from"

"I caution you as I was never cautioned you will never let go, you will never be satiated."

"You have to live your life if you're going to do original work. Your work will come out of an authentic life, and if you suppress all of your most passionate impulses in the service of an art that has not yet declared itself, you're making a terrible mistake. When I was young I led the life I thought writers were supposed to lead, in which you repudiate the world, ostentatiously consecrating all of your energies to the task of making art. I just sat in Provincetown at a desk and it was ghastly—the more I sat there not writing the more I thought that I just hadn't given up the world enough. After two years of that, I came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to be a writer. So I took a teaching job in Vermont, though I had spent my life till that point thinking that real poets don't teach. But I took this job, and the minute I started teaching—the minute I had obligations in the world—I started to write again."

"I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn't expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring—afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joyin the raw wind of the new world."

"(You said once that the life of a poet oscillates between ecstasy and agony, and what mitigates those extremes is the necessary daily business of living.) Yes. Friends, conversation, gardens. Daily life. It’s what we have. I believe in the world. I trust it to provide me."

"I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen; for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum."

"The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last."

"Father has his arm around Tereze. She squints. My thumb is in my mouth: my fifth autumn. Near the copper beech the spaniel dozes in shadows. Not one of us does not avert his eyes."

"Intense love always leads to mourning."

"The master said You must write what you see. But what I see does not move me. The master answered Change what you see."

"As long as I have been in science, which is let's say 1960 to today, just about every five years there are major changes in technology that allow you to do things that you previously either said were just too hard or there was no way to do them — or which you hadn't imagined that you could ever do."

"This milestone of biology's megaproject is the long-promised draft DNA sequence from the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (the public project). The sequence itself is available to all those connected to the Internet … In the paper in this issue, we are presented with a description of the strategy used to decipher the structures of the huge DNA molecules that constitute the genome, and with analyses of the content encoded in the genome. It is the achievement of a coordinated effort involving 20 laboratories and hundreds of people around the world. It reflects the scientific community at its best: working collaboratively, pooling its resources and skills, keeping its focus on the goal, and making its results available to all as they were acquired."

"The prominence of Watson and Crick and the Phage Group made Baltimore all the more desperate to do some real experimental biology. During the spring of his junior year, Baltimore became president of the Biology Club and enrolled in a microbiology seminar that discussed the advances of Luria, Delbrück, Lederberg, and others. But he was sick of just talking about biology. He had understood very quickly that designing and completing experiments were the accomplishments that make a biologist; gathering an encyclopedia knowledge of facts simply makes a good student."

"Two independent groups of investigators have found evidence of an enzyme in virions of RNA tumour viruses which synthesizes DNA from an RNA template. This discovery, if upheld, will have important implications not only for carcinogenesis by RNA viruses but also for the general understanding of genetic transcription: apparently the classical process of information transfer from DNA to RNA can be inverted."

"The world of animal viruses appears to offer an unfathomable diversity of specimens, but, as the molecular biology of the replication of many viruses has been studied, a pattern of behavior has emerged. The viruses can be divided into classes, each of which has its own method of transmitting its genetic information from one generation to the next and its own style of expressing its genetic information. Although in some cases the data are still fragmentary, it is possible to outline the behavior of these systems and to place them in a formal scheme."

"Viral genomes must make mRNA that can be read by host ribosomes ... David Baltimore (Nobel laureate) used this insight to describe a simple way to think about virus genomes ... The original Baltimore scheme missed one genome type: the gapped DNA of the Hepadnaviridae ..."

"An especially intractable breed of problems in physics involves those with very many or an infinite number of degrees of freedom and in addition involve “renormalization.” Renormalization is explained as the existence of very many length or energy scales of importance in the physics of the problem. The renormalization group approach is a way of reducing the complexity of these problems to the point where numerical methods can be used to solve them. The Kondo problem (dilute magnetic alloys) is used as an illustration."

"The fourth aspect of renormalization group theory is the construction of nondiagrammatic renormalization group transformations, which are then solved numerically, usually using a digital computer. This is the most exciting aspect of the renormalization group, the part of the theory that makes it possible to solve problems which are unreachable by s. The Kondo problem has been solved by a nondiagrammatic computer method."

"Asymptotic freedom arises as follows. The fundamental interactions of quarks and gluons are modified by “radiative” corrections of higher order in the quark-gluon coupling constant. These radiative corrections depend on the quark and gluon momenta. A careful analysis shows that the cumulative effect of radiative corrections to all orders can be characterized by a momentum-dependent effective coupling constant. The effective coupling is found to vanish in the limit of large momenta (to be precise, large momentum transfers between the quarks and gluons). This is called asymptotic freedom. As a result of asymptotic freedom the quarks can behave as nearly free particles at short distances; this is required to explain the high energy electron scattering experiments ... Meanwhile the interactions of quarks at long distances can be strong enough to bind the quarks into the observed bound states; protons, mesons, etc."

"Sometime toward the end of my second year, I started working with Gell-Mann. I went to Gell-Mann and he gave me a problem to work on and suggested I start working with fixed source theory of K-particles, where he wanted me to do things involving strong and weak interactions. And it's when I read about fixed source theory that I began to learn about renormalization group and realized it could be applied to fixed source theory, and I don't know whether there were papers that I read about renormalization group and fixed source theory, or I worked it out for myself, but in playing around with this, sort of trying to learn what was going on, I discovered that there were great simplifications that took place when you took the fixed source equation and took them to high energies, and when you did a leading log approximation. In the end, I discovered that those equations, simplified at the high energies -- you could get exact solutions. That was part of my thesis. And that was the initial thing that sparked my interest in the renormalization group. I remember when I presented my thesis to a seminar, and this was when Feynman was there, but not Gell-Mann. I went through all this exciting mathematics and toward the end, someone said, "Yes, that's fine, but what good is it?" I remember Feynman's answer as "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth!""

"The first efforts to turn quantum field theory into a rigorous mathematical subject occurred in the 1950s, when Wightman in particular formulated a set of axioms which define what we mean by a relativistic quantum field theory ... The subject took a significant step forward around 1970 largely through the work of Ken Wilson, who taught us to think of quantum field theory as a kind of second-order phase transition ... The Standard Model of particle physics was also formulated in the 1970s, and still stands as our best description of the strong and electroweak interactions after decades of thorough vetting in high-energy-physics experiments. ... Ken Wilson is a hero to me and many others because he provided a satisfying answer to the question: What is quantum field theory? (His was not the first answer, nor was it the complete and final answer, but nevertheless it transformed our understanding of the subject.) Wilson understood more deeply than his predecessors the meaning of renormalization."

"Ken Wilson was one of a very small number of physicists who changed the way we all think, not just about specific phenomena, but about a vast range of different phenomena."

"You shouldn’t choose a problem on the basis of the tool. You start by thinking about the physics problem, and the computational method should be a tool like any other. Maybe you’ll solve it using computer techniques, maybe using a contour integral; but it’s very important to approach it starting from the physics because otherwise you get lost in the use of the tool, and lose track of where you’re trying to go."

"Wilson was quick to appreciate the promise of QCD, but he realized that to calculate the theory’s consequences at (relatively) low energies or long distances would be a demanding task. Wilson’s approach ... was revolutionary in its directness: He formulated the theory in computer-friendly form, essentially as a complicated definite integral in a space of enormously large dimension, and then set out to perform the integral numerically. Many years passed before computers and algorithms were up to the job, but lattice gauge theory amply fulfilled Wilson’s vision. The highest award in the field, awarded annually at the major international conference in Lattice Field Theory, bears Wilson’s name."

"We were witnessing the birth of a new era in endocrinology, one that started with Yalow."

"We still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and want to belong exclusively in the home."

"We cannot expect in the immediate future that all women who seek it will achieve full equality of opportunity. But if women are to start moving towards that goal, we must believe in ourselves or no one else will believe in us; we must match our aspirations with the competence, courage and determination to succeed."

"Initially, new ideas are rejected. Later they become dogma, if you’re right. And if you’re really lucky you can publish your rejections as part of your Nobel presentation."

"Having said all this, I acknowledge that “I got mine” from the government over the course of many years. Thus, as I say so long,” one component of my last-gasp disquiet stems from pompously worrying about biologists who are starting out or are in mid-career."

"Whether or not a researcher of a certain notoriety deserves that the ‘support system’ [to] keep him going, there is a far more general problem: What props up biological research, at least in the vaunted US of A, involves a situation so deeply imbued with entitlement mentality that it has sunk into institutional corruption. A principal symptom of this state of affairs involves the following: People are hired after they have undergone long stints of training; and a potential hiree must present a large body of documented accomplishments. In my day you could get a faculty job with zero post-doc papers, as in the case of yours truly; but now the CV of a successful applicant looks like that of a newly minted full Professor from olden times. Notwithstanding these demands, and the associated high quality of a fledgling faculty-level type, the job starts with some “set-up” money for equipping the lab; but next to no means are provided to initiate that ‘research program’ and to sustain it during the years to come."

"US institutions (possibly also those in other countries) behave as though they… are entitled to research funding, which will magically materialize from elsewhere: “Get a grant, serf! If you can’t do it quickly, or have trouble for some years — or if your funding doesn’t get renewed, despite continuing productivity — forget it!” But what if there are so many applicants (as there are nowadays) that even a meritorious proposal gets the supplicant nowhere or causes a research group to grind prematurely to a halt? What if the situation is worsened when the government at hand is anti-science and otherwise squanders its resources on international adventurism?"