University Of California Berkeley Alumni

"These cases indicate that a sufficiently early split shows up along more than one trajectory, and it follows that any development within the PIE locus should be evident along all three trajectories. This is precisely what happens with the centum-satem division.... In view of its attestation along all three trajectories, the centum-satem split must have arisen in the eastern part of the range, in or near the locus. ... Since in the west the satem languages are the later entrants wherever the chronology is clear, and the frontier languages are centum, the satem side of the isogloss must have been to the east. Since satem languages are most numerous in the south, while centum languages predominate in the north and the centum language Tocharian appears far to the east of the locus as well as somewhat to the north, the satem side of the isogloss must have lain not just to the east but specifically to the southeast.... Since the centum-satem division is visible along all three trajectories, it arose in or near the locus after the spread began and spread outward after the centum languages had begun to spread."

"Along the forest trajectory as well there is evidence of either an early Indie presence or undifferentiated Proto-Indo-Iranian or Proto-Indo-Aryan. Among the Indo-Iranian loans into early Finno-Ugric are some so phonologically archaic that they could well be Proto-Indo-Iranian... Iranian, but not Indo-Aryan, regularly reflects PIE s as h, so this Finno-Ugric form looks more Indie than Iranian. Abaev also cites some less well attested forms that could be specifically Indie... These borrowings would have taken place somewhere in the vicinity of the southern Ural Mountains. They were received from a steppe language and incorporated into Finno-Ugric as it began its spread along the forest trajectory. This linguistic evidence for an Indie or Proto-Indo-Iranian wave preceding Iranian on the steppe is weak but legitimate. In partial confirmation of it, Kuz’mina identifies the Andronovo culture of eastern Kazakhstan in the mid-second millennium BC as Indo-Aryan..... There is also evidence for Indo-Aryan along the steppe trajectory in the form of a set of Crimean place names which Trubač identifies as Indo-Aryan. This evidence is even weaker—place names in general have poor diagnostic value since they lack denotational meaning—but carefully researched and again legitimate. If Trubačv is right there is evidence for an Indie advance to the western steppe. Taken together, the Finno-Ugric and Crimean evidence are consistent with the assumption of a short-lived Indie or Indo-Aryan presence at the frontier of the Iranian spread on the steppe, in addition to the well-known Indie frontier in northeastern Mesopotamia and India."

"The bifurcation of Indo-Iranian is well known to be evident not only in South Asia, where all three of Indic, Nuristani and Iranian sub-branches are found, but also in ancient eastern Anatolia, where either an Indie language or undifferentiated Indo-Aryan or Indo-Iranian is evident in early Mitannian vocabulary (e.g. aika-wartanna ‘one course’, where aika is cognate to Sanskrit eka ‘one’, an Indie word) while Old Persian and Avestan are Iranian..."

"A consequence of the reconstruction offered here is that the attested distribution of IE then turns out to be no singularity but just one regular episode in a standing pattern of spreads."

"Three language trajectories are shown.., and these are contemporaneous but not equal in prominence or carrying power. The central one, henceforth the steppe trajectory, shows the east-to-west spread of languages across the Eurasian steppe, and is based on four spreads: that of IE to Europe in the Bronze Age, that of Iranian to (and occasionally into) Central Europe during the Iron Age, that of Turkic in the early centuries of this era, and that of Mongolian beginning in the Middle Ages. To the north of it is the almost equally extensive forest trajectory through the northern forests. This is the route followed by the Uralic language family in its spread from the central Urals (c. the fourth or fifth millennium) as far west as Norway and Estonia (by perhaps the first millennium BC). To the south of the Caspian and Black Seas runs the southern or desert trajectory that brought the Mongols to the southern Caucasus, and before that Turkish to Turkey, and before that Iranian languages to ancient Persia and northern Mesopotamia, and still earlier Armenian, Hittite and its sisters, and other early IE dialects to Asia Minor."

"Approximately every two millennia, then, there has occurred a spread of a language family from a locus in the eastern part of the central Eurasian spread zone to cover the steppe and central Asia, extending partially or intermittently to the Danube plain, Anatolia, and northern Mesopotamia. The loci of the historically attested spreads are near the edge of the spread zone rather than in the centre of it: the piedmont to the south (Bactria-Sogdiana) for Iranian, the north of Mongolia for Turkic and Mongolian. The trajectories of language spread run east to west along the steppe and through the desert to the Near East as shown .... To take clear and historically well-attested examples, the locus, trajectories, and range of IE must have been much like those of Iranian or Turkic. ... The placement of the locus specifically in the vicinity of Bactria-Sogdiana is justified in .... A homeland reconstructed as locus, trajectory and range removes the dilemma: a locus in the vicinity of Bactria-Sogdiana implies a spread beginning at the frontier of ancient Near Eastern civilization and a range throughout the steppe and central Asia, following the east-to-west trajectory, with occasional or periodic spreads into the Danube plain and Anatolia."

"Prior to the Iranian expansion, in the early Bronze Age, IE spread to cover the entire steppe and the Danube plain (and subsequently all of Europe), with substantial speech communities also in Anatolia (Hittite and congeners) and northern Mesopotamia (surviving in Armenian) and, in all probability, coverage of much or all of western central Asia (probably by ancestral Indo-Iranian). What is historically attested of the IE spread fits closely the pattern followed later by Iranian, Turkic, and Mongolian."

"Prior to the Turkic expansion, at the beginning of the Iron Age, Iranian spread from somewhere in the vicinity of Bactria, Sogdiana, and the eastern steppe to cover most or all of western central Asia and the entire steppe, much of the Near East at least to eastern Anatolia, and, at least intermittently, the Danube plain, where Slavic vocabulary and ethnonyms attest to a major Iranianization at about the fifth century AD, and where there is good archaeological evidence of a Scythian presence in the mid-first millennium BC..."

"The location of the Anatolian branch of IE (Hittite and its sisters) is a problem, or at least a puzzle, for IE homeland studies. The Anatolian languages are attested very early in Asia Minor, removed from Europe and far from the steppe; Gamkrelidze and Ivanov ... offer as a strength the ability of their proposed homelands to account for the location of Hittite with minimal migration. Alternatively or additionally, the location of Tocharian—attested in the early centuries AD well to the east of most IE territory in present-day Xinkiang (Chinese Turkestan)—is a problem or a puzzle... Accounting for the locations of both Hittite and Tocharian is usually presented, at least rhetorically, as a major problem."

"Several kinds of evidence for the PIE locus have been presented here. Ancient loanwords point to a locus along the desert trajectory, not particularly close to Mesopotamia and probably far out in the eastern hinterlands. The structure of the family tree, the accumulation of genetic diversity at the western periphery of the range, the location of Tocharian and its implications for early dialect geography, the early attestation of Anatolian in Asia Minor, and the geography of the centum-satem split all point in the same direction: a locus in western central Asia. Evidence presented in Volume II supports the same conclusion: the long-standing westward trajectories of languages point to an eastward locus, and the spread of IE along all three trajectories points to a locus well to the east of the Caspian Sea. The satem shift also spread from a locus to the south-east of the Caspian, with satem languages showing up as later entrants along all three trajectory terminals. (The satem shift is a post-PIE but very early IE development.) The locus of the IE spread was therefore somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana. This locus resembles those of the three known post-IE spreads: those of Indo-Iranian (from a locus close to that of PIE), Turkic (from a locus near north-western Mongolia), and Mongolian (from north-eastern Mongolia)... Thus in regard to its locus, as in other respects, the PIE spread was no singularity but was absolutely ordinary for its geography and its time-frame. ... The reason that dialect divisions arising in the locus show up along more than one trajectory is that the Caspian Sea divides westward spreads into steppe versus desert trajectories quite close to the locus and hence quite early in the spread. In contrast, developments that occurred farther west, as the split of Slavic from Baltic in the middle Volga may have, continue to spread along only one trajectory. This is why the Pontic steppe is an unlikely locus for the PIE spread. ...Thus the structure of the IE family tree, the distribution of IE genetic diversity over the map, and what can be inferred of the geographical distribution of dialectal diversity in early IE all point to a locus in western central Asia"

"The Iranian family, which was next to sweep across the steppe and deserts, finds its region of greatest diversity in the central Asian mountains, and its ancestral Indo-Iranian family finds its own greatest diversity in the mountain region from central Asia to northern India (i.e. Bactria- Sogdiana and parts just south)."

"It is a basic tenet of migration and homeland theory that the geographical location of a language family’s proto-homeland is to be sought in the vicinity of the root of the family tree (i.e. in the region where the deepest branches come together on a map); or, more generally, that the homeland is to be sought in the region of present greatest genetic diversity of the family."

"The vast interior of Eurasia is a linguistic spread zone—a genetic and typological bottleneck where many genetic lines go extinct, structural types tend to converge, a single language or language family spreads out over a broad territorial range, and one language family replaces another over a large range every few millennia. The linguistic geography of the central and western grasslands, from at least the Neolithic until early modern times, has consisted of an overall westward trajectory of language spreads... The central Eurasian spread zone... was part of a standing pattern whereby languages were drawn into the spread zone, spread westward, and were eventually succeeded by the next spreading family."

"The archaeological sources on which this summary is based... most often describe the westward cultures as derived from, or extensions from, the eastern ones. Mallory (1989) and Anthony (1991, 1995) interpret the directionality of cultural derivation as west to east. It is the east-to-west directionality of cultural derivation that would be consistent with the east-to-west linguistic trajectory, since spread of a whole culture is likely to involve language spread (and vice versa). A predominantly east-to-west directionality of cultural derivation and descent for the Eneolithic steppe would be a strong indication that the spread zone with its westward trajectories had taken shape. This is a purely archaeological question, but it is important to dating the rise of the linguistic spread zone."

"There are several linguistically plausible possibilities for the origin of Pre-PIE. It could have spread eastward from the Black Sea steppe (as proposed by Mallory 1989 and by Anthony 1991, 1995), so that the locus formed only after this spread but still very early in the history of disintegrating PIE. This large eastward spread would be a departure from the general westward trajectory of spreads in central Eurasia, occasioned by the epoch-making domestication of the horse and development of wheeled transport. Pre-PIE could have been a central Asian language long before its rapid spread; if so it had a large range before its expansion, and the dispersal began with the development of the locus in a pre-existent range. It could have come into the spread zone from the east as Mongolian, Turkic, and probably Indo-Iranian did."

"Central Eurasia is a linguistic bottleneck, spread zone, and extinction chamber, but its languages had to come from somewhere. The locus of the IE spread is a theoretical point representing a linguistic epicentre, not a literal place of ethnic or linguistic origin, so the ultimate origin of PIE need not be in the same place as the locus."

"These principles make it possible to pinpoint the locus in space more or less accurately even for a language family as old as IE. Here it will be shown that the locus accounting for the distribution of loanwords, internal innovations, and genetic diversity within IE could only have lain well to the east of the Caspian Sea."

"I am afraid that I have seen enough of both the governance of science, and the political operations at the European Union. In these three long months, I have indeed met many excellent and committed individuals, at different levels of the organization of the ERC and the EC. However, I have lost faith in the system itself."

"“Our investment in prevention and research is an investment in our nations … it all depends on healthy people, the result of our knowledge must be prevention. If we trust treatment without an investment in prevention, then we have failed.”"

"If you reduce the amount of , the level in the atmosphere goes down fairly quickly, within decades, as opposed to CO2, if you reduce the emissions to the atmosphere, you don’t really see a signal in the atmosphere for a hundred years or so. […] I had an invite to a meeting with Al Gore, some years ago now, and made these methane arguments, and he was really pushback. That’s just his argument, “It’s hard enough to get people to think about CO2. Don’t confuse them.” […] Some people say, “Well, let’s fix CO2, and then we can worry about methane.” Well, that’s the wrong. It’s the other way around that actually makes sense. Do something about methane, because you’ll get a response right away."

"He epitomizedeverything a Berkeley professor should be: visionary and innovative, but always focusing onhelping those who were poor and disenfranchised."

"But theatre is so dominated by men that no matter what kind of sheltered bubble you’re in, you’re going to encounter sexist bullshit. That’s just always going to be an issue…"

"When I’m making work, I’m very much thinking about how there’s a relationship between whatever the play is doing and whatever sort of automatic dismissive mechanisms people have for not wanting to deal with a particular issue. I think all of my plays have some sort of issue that they’re wrestling with that the audience normally doesn’t want to wrestle with. They want to be like, “I know what that is,” and not have to wrestle, because it’s a human instinct not to want to have to be challenged…"

"I like working with identities and stories outside of my own experience, so it’s kind of just a necessity…"

"It’s gone away from the thing that I hate, and now it’s more the thing that I don’t know how to do at all, or the thing that’s really hard to do…"

""There's no question that climate change has increased the frequency of certain types of extreme weather events," climate scientist Michael Mann told me in an interview, "including drought, intense hurricanes, and supertyphoons, the frequency and intensity and duration of heat waves, and potentially other types of extreme weather though the details are still being debated within the scientific community.'"

"...If we fail to act to bring down our carbon emissions over the next decade, this will lock in disastrous melting of the ice sheets, sea level rise, and a rise in devastating weather extremes down the road. (2019)"

"this vision could have been built into the global trade architecture that would rise up in the early to mid-1990s. If we had continued to reduce our emissions at that pace we would have been on track for a completely de-carbonized global economy by mid-century. But we didn't do any of those things. And as the famed climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, puts it, "There's a huge procrastination penalty when it comes to emitting carbon into the atmosphere": the longer we wait, the more it builds up, the more dramatically we must change to reduce the risks of catastrophic warming."

"I just asked a lot of really stupid questions to a lot of really patient people, and they were amazing. They were so generous with their time and so patient with my dumb questions. That’s how I learned, and I’m totally grateful for them."

"(- Any tips or words of wisdom for our current and potential new students?) - Take advantage of the city! Moving from the West Coast, I found it hard to adjust to New York. And I won’t defend the weather, the subway, or the smell, but there are so many interesting people here. Go to parties, go see a friend-of-a-friend’s terrible show, say yes to weird things. You never know where life will take you here."

"I love this planet, and I’m curious about how it works."

"I started my career as an astrophysicist, and then I realized that nowhere else in the universe is as good as here, right? This is the best planet."

"I refuse to give in to despair. I just don’t have time for that. I’m too busy doing science."

"At the other end of the spectrum are stories that it's too late, that it's all over, that there's nothing left to do. Misinterpretations of the data lead some to declare that the Earth itself is going to die or human beings are going to die out in the near future, stories that clash with what the evidence tells us. They make people feel terrible, and they make them passive. Doomism, as climate scientist Michael Mann calls it, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if it prevents the action that can shift us away from the worst-case scenarios."

"According to , “Professor Mike Mann has been a world leader in scientific efforts to understand the natural variability of the climate system and to reconstruct global temperature variations over the past two millennia. This critically important work led to the famous 'hockey-stick' temperature reconstruction. The hockey stick provides compelling evidence for the emergence of a human-caused warming signal from the background noise of natural fluctuations in climate.”"

"Mathematics is primarily a tool for human thought."

"I was really amazed by my first encounters with serious mathematics textbooks...I could appreciate that the mathematics was an impressive intellectual edifice, and I could follow the steps of proofs. I assumed that such an elaborate buildup must be leading to a fantastic denouement, which I eagerly awaited -- and waited, and waited. It was only much later, after much of the mathematics I had studied had come alive for me that I came to appreciate how ineffective and denatured the standard ((definition theorem proof)n remark)m style is for communicating mathematics. When I reread some of these early texts, I was stunned by how well their formalism and indirection hid the motivation, the intuition and the multiple ways to think about their subjects: they were unwelcoming to the full human mind."

"The term `geometry'...refers to a pattern of processing within our brains related to our spatial and visual senses, more than it refers to a separate content area of mathematics."

"When mathematics is explained, formalized and written down, there is a strong tendency to favor symbolic modes of thought at the expense of everything else, because symbols are easier to write and more standardized than other modes of reasoning. But when mathematics loses its connection to our minds, it dissolves into a haze."

"People can be fooled into thinking of mathematics as logical, formal, symbolic reasoning. But this is far from reality...computers are far better at formal computation and formal reasoning, but humans are far better mathematicians."

"The most important thing about mathematics is how it resides in the human brain."

"Mathematics is a process of staring hard enough with enough perseverence at at the fog of muddle and confusion to eventually break through to improved clarity. I'm happy when I can admit, at least to myself, that my thinking is muddled, and I try to overcome the embarrassment that I might reveal ignorance or confusion.Over the years, this has helped me develop clarity in some things, but I remain muddled in many others."

"... for almost as long as people have been anticipating ... thinking about , the prime candidate for new physics, beyond the , ... has been supersymmetry."

"... nature has very few good ideas — it recycles them in subtle and interesting ways, over and over again — and it's our job to understand how that works."

"... like most physicists, I really enjoy talking about physics."

"Whether in physics and mathematics or in the humanities, when something really finally works, it has a certain perfection to it, a feeling of inevitability, like it was so completely obvious all along, and it couldn't be any other way."

"This is the best few tens of billions years in the history of the universe to do cosmology."

"The hierarchy problem is the elephant in the room. ... And it originally showed up in the context of doublet–triplet splitting problem."

"The stakes are higher than the past. We aren’t asking about this or that particle, but something much more deeply structural about physical reality. … By far the best way to settle this question is to lead a charge to the highest possible energies and build a 100-TeV collider."

"There are still many open questions that need answering: Why does gravity defy the notion of space-time in short distances? Why are there humongous quantum fluctuations in shorter distances? How is a larger Universe possible? These questions relate to the hierarchy problem and fine tuning and are divided into two stages. First, one should ask: “Why is there a macroscopic Universe that is not broken in the Planck scale,” and second: “Why are there large scale structures in the large Universe and they are not broken into Planck scale black holes?”"