Yale University Alumni

"A fierce antagonist in business competition, Mr. Trippe practiced a good-neighbor policy in dealing with foreign countries. He was a talented diplomat. If an earthquake or a hurricane occurred in Latin America, Pan Am was quickly on the scene, helping to remove refugees and providing emergency supplies."

"Mass travel by air made possible by the Jet Age may prove to be more significant to world destiny than the atom bomb. For there can be no atom bomb more powerful than the air tourist, charged with curiosity, enthusiasm and good will, who can roam the four corners of the world, meeting in friendship and understanding the people of other nations and races."

"Today, the frontier of our great west is behind us. Once again we have come to a realization, just as did our forefathers in the days of sail, that America’s position among the nations of the world, the prosperity of our industry and commerce, the welfare of all our people is inseparably bound up in the advancement of our foreign trade."

"Trippe had been a continuous innovator, but the sad irony is that he failed to re-invent his company for the leaner, far more competitive age he had done so much to shape: the age of travel for Everyman. A decade after his death, his airline, substantially dismembered, finally expired in 1991. [...] Throughout his career, Juan Trippe had been driven by the great American instinct for seeing a market before it happened–and then making it happen. In a real sense, he fathered the international airline business. To do so, he took on the entire airline industry, and risked his company to see his vision through. You’ve just got to admire a guy like that."

"History has clearly shown that among all the nations in the world, those which have developed to the fullest, their facilities for communication and transport have been the nations which have led the advance of civilization, and which have raised above all others, the standard of living of their people."

"A century ago and for three brief decades, our nation held that world leadership. A small country, confined to our Atlantic coast, when our vital sea commerce was crowded from the seas by stronger competitors, America rose to claim her rightful maritime birthright. Inspired in this cause our merchants provided the capital, our shipwrights the genius, our master mariners the driving power that brought into being a new maritime force. From our seaports raced forth a new breed of ocean craft, the Clippers, of such sharp-cut lines and towering masts as had never before been seen upon the seas. With hard-driving Yankee masters on their quarter decks, they raced through gales and over endless seas, lee rails awash, tall-rigging, taut with full-blown sails, to sweep our flag to a leadership upon the Seven Seas that was never successfully to be challenged in the days of sail. And in these thirty years our commerce mounted, our prestige among the nations rose, the standard of living of our people increased at a rate which has never since been equaled in our history."

"Writing is a learned and practiced craft, not a work of magic or mystery. Indeed, the magic happens when you are practicing the craft. Literary talent may be distributed unevenly, but no one is “born” a writer."

"My hands-down favorite writer is my friend , and that's in large part because much of what I've learned about writing over the last couple of decades has come in the form of gifts from him. Carlo is an apostle of craft, skill, mastery, and work. He writes great prose, to be sure, but he has also taught me about blocking, outlining, editing, structure—all those things I pretended to do, but never actually did. Talking to Carlo, I am always reminded that craft itself produces ideas and insights, unbidden thoughts that transcend the nuts and bolts work. That's why we tell our students that writing is thinking, and that thinking may well be incomplete without writing."

"This was a moment where there was no veneer of respectability or politeness. It was push and shove and scrape and push to get in there and get out safely."

"When you go into the cities or you talk to people who are more educated ... those women are on the verge potentially of losing everything, and their stories will rip your heart out in ways you can't imagine."

"You just realize there isn't a huge amount of space or time in their life, at this stage, in these rural areas to worry about much else. And they kind of are in acceptance of their sort of standing in the world."

"It’s a tragedy. I didn’t know her personally, but of course, I know of her. I can’t say that journalism has become more dangerous, although I will say that more and more of my colleagues and friends have lost their lives covering conflicts."

"Bearing witness to trauma can be traumatic in and of itself. There can be the risk of losing loved ones, losing colleagues, watching people die, watching children being injured or killed."

"The goal is to look polished and put together. And the goal is to have my appearance not be a distraction one way or the other."

"Education is really encouraged for men and women. I think you can call that out as an injustice. But it is arrogant to make an assumption that wearing a headscarf is an injustice."

"How many times I had been reminded that people are people, that there is a shared human experience, no matter how different our societies, that connects us."

"I had seen so many cities leveled, so many people killed, and yet so little really changed. That didn’t mean that some wars weren’t worth fighting. It just meant that the goals needed to be more specific and perhaps less idealistic, grounded in the reality of how parts of the world see us and not just the ideal of how we see ourselves."

"Sometimes I wanted the call to end, not because I don't want to look at my beautiful children, but because it does become so painful at a certain point."

"What you learn over time is not to try and eliminate fear: It’s there for a good reason. But you have to learn to control it, to lean into it and to ensure that the rational brain is the one calling the shots and making the decisions and trying to get yourself and your crew out safely after, ideally, you’ve done the job that you came there to do."

"Good fixer can make the difference between a hellish assignment and a successful and enjoyable one."

"Fear is closely intertwined with panic, and panic in a war zone can get you into really, really deep trouble."

"Don't talk about my flavor unless you know that my flavor is insurrection it is rebellion, resistance."

"There's always more to write."

"Woman walks into a warzone and has warriors cowering at her feet."

"I use my words to raise the alarm on the conflicts of our time...in the hopes that someone might hear something that moves them."

"You don't know compromise until you have rebuilt your home for the third time."

"[N]o consensus... exists among physicists about how to understand quantum theory. There... is no precise, exact physical theory... Instead there is raging controversy. ...How can the manifest and overwhelming success ...be reconciled with complete uncertainty about what the theory claims about the nature of matter?"

"I have never bumped into Tim Maudlin, but I have felt his gravitational tug. A Reddit discussion... called Maudlin "probably the most influential person in philosophy of physics." Someone chimed in that Maudlin... is "without a doubt an intellectual beast." Maudlin impresses even... Jim Holt... When I asked Holt "What’s your utopia?," he replied "arguing eternally about gauge theory" with Maudlin and a few other pals. ...Maudlin's ..."The Defeat of Reason"... ends by suggesting that we "shorten the dignified designation Homo sapiens to the pithier and more accurate Homo sap." Ouch."

"Maudlin's book is likely to upset many physicists and metaphysicians, but in a positive, thought provoking way. Moreover, its plain presentation style makes it a good introductory book for students and non-specialists. In short, it is highly recommended for anybody interested in quantum theory, and especially in what "happens in between.""

"General Relativity is... completely clear and precise. ...[W]hat the theory says is unambiguous. The more one works with it, the clearer it becomes, and there are no great debates... about how to use it. (The only bit of unclarity... to represent the distribution of matter... using the . Einstein remarked that that part... "is low grade wood," while the part describing the space-time structure... is "fine marble.")"

"...Maudlin takes up the conceptual and ontological foundations of classical and modern physics and explains in a lucid manner how Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity emerged from Newtonian mechanics and Galilean relativity. ...revealing the foundations of physics to those with more interest in understanding the general philosophical concepts rather than merely understanding how to solve the equations."

"It has become almost de rigueur in quantum foundations literature to misuse the terms "realist," "realistic," "antirealist," and "antirealistic." These terms have a precise meaning in the philosophy of science... that seems to be... unfamiliar to most physicists. ...[T]hey simply toss them around with no attached meaning ...[with] terrible consequences in foundations of quantum theory."

"[P]hysical theories are neither realist nor antirealist. That is... a . It is a person's attitude toward a physical theory that is either realist or antirealist. ...[[Copernican heliocentrism|[T]he theory]] toward which Osiander was antirealist and Galileo realist is one and the same theory. The theory itself is neither."

"The scientific realist maintains that in at least some cases, we have good evidential reasons to accept theories or theoretical claims as true, or approximately true, or on-the-road-to-truth. The scientific antirealist denies this. These attitudes come in degrees... [T]his is a question addressed by epistemology and confirmation theory..."

"Sometimes, accepting the Copenhagen Interpretation is understood... to use the quantum recipe without... question: Shut up and calculate. Such rejects the aspiration... defined above. Hence it is not even in the running..."

"If the correct solution to the measurement problem does not involve local beables, or if those beables have no nonrelativistic analogs, then starting with nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is counterproductive. But one has to start somewhere..."

"Starting from what we understand and seeing clearly its inadequacies can provide a path to conceptual progress."

"A physical theory should clearly and forthrightly address two... questions: what there is, and what it does. The answer to the first... the ontology... to the second... its dynamics. The ontology should have a sharp mathematical description, and the dynamics... implemented by precise equations describing how the ontology... evolve[s]. ...All three of the theories we will examine meet these demands."

"Physics aspires to a sort of universality that is unique among empirical sciences and holds, in that sense, a foundational position among them."

"[P]rior to Newton, Galileo sought to specify the "intertial" motion of terrestrial objects—...the motion they would display if subject to no forces—and he concluded that such motion would be uniform circular motion. He arrived at this conclusion from his experimental work with inclined planes."

"Newton's First Law, the... Law of Inertia, refers only to bodies that are subject to no external forces. It is tempting to say that Newton postulates that such bodies "continue in the same state of motion," but such... would miss the revolutionary aspect... the First Law specifies exactly what counts as "the same state of motion." For Aristotle... a piece of aether in uniform circular motion about [earth,] the center of the universe is always in "the same state of motion," and so there would be no reason to seek out external causes... In Aristotle's physics, external causes are responsible for unnatural motion, such as a rock moving upward instead of down. So for Aristotle, the falling of a stone... requires no external cause, and the continued rotation of a sphere of fixed stars requires no external cause: this what these sorts of matter do by nature."

"Unlike space-time theory, where there is substantial agreement about how to understand the best physics we have (General Relativity), quantum theory has always been a battleground of contention. Nothing one can say would command the assent of most physicists and philosophers."

"The central problem facing attempts to understand a quantum theory is how it manages to model empirical phenomena in a principled way. This is often referred to as "the measurement problem"..."

"Present physics elucidates the "motion" of an object as its trajectory through space-time. A precise understanding... requires a precise account of the structure of space-time. The nature of space-time itself... is the topic of the companion volume... Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time. The present volume addresses the question: What is matter? ...Our main task is to understand just what quantum theory claims about the nature of the material constituents of the world."

"John Stewart Bell made a proposal... which he called the theory of local beables. "Beables" refers to the ontology of a theory: what it postulates to exist. "Local" indicates a beable that exists in a small region of space-time... What one needs... is an inventory of local beables and an account of their dynamics: how they get distributed in space-time."

"I hope... to have provided a framework sturdy enough and correct enough to serve both professional and amateur naval architects who propose to redesign the craft which carries us on our journey."

"[T]he most general question we can ask about matter is what sort of thing it is. ...[W]e might hold that matter is made of point-like particles, or of fields, or of one-dimensional strings, or of some combination of these, or of something else altogether. Given any of these ...there are further, more specific questions ...We will be concerned with the most general questions, rather than the more specific ones."

"[T]he science of thermodynamics... initially aimed at providing a precise account of how heat spreads through an object and from one object to another. But we can discover... detailed equations governing heat flow and still not have an account of what heat is. ...It is a characteristic of contemporary physics education that much more time is spent learning how to solve the equation and get a practical answer... than in... the nature of heat, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of matter. Physics students... fascinated by these foundational questions can find themselves frustrated by... classes that refuse to address them. This volume is dedicated to them as much as it is to philosophers..."

"[T]he experimental verification of Bell's inequality constitutes the most significant event of the last half-century. ...[O]ur basic picture of space, time, and physical reality must change. These results, and the mysteries they engender, should be the common property of all who contemplate with wonder the universe we inhabit."

"Many... would agree that Relativity prohibits something from going faster than light but disagree over just what something is."