Members Of The United States National Academy Of Sciences

"Enrico Fermi was the great magnet at . His grasp of physics, and both, was awesome. He took his teaching seriously. We’ve all encountered lecturers who cover up trivialities in layers of formalism and obfuscation. Fermi, the other way around, always got to the heart of things even in the most truly complex situations and exposed it with simplicity and clarity. He was almost too lucid. We could follow and marvel at his tricks and shortcuts but we often stumbled when left to our own devices."

"Relativistic quantum theory predicts that particles having must come in pairs with opposite charges but identical masses (and identical lifetimes if unstable). One member of the pair is called the particle, the other the antiparticle. Which is called by which name is a matter of history and convenience. It turns out that there are other kinds of "charge" in addition to electric charge; for example, so-called . The necessity of particle-antiparticle paris obtains for charges of any kind. Thus, not only is there an antiproton to the proton, there is an antineutrino to the neutron. The neutron is electrically neutral but it has baryon number charge."

"Everyone acknowledges that there are crucial tests to be made and information to be found in the com­ing round of experimentation; so that, given only the resources needed to exploit the visible scien­tific opportunities, we surely face very exciting times. Moreover, the proponents acknowledge, even if everything goes as expected, that there will remain much more to be known than can be revealed in the next round of experimentation. In­deed, there are very stirring visions about what may lie out there beyond the immediately foreseeable do­mains of direct, experimental at­tack. The trouble, however, is this: they conceive that these farther reaches may lie forever beyond direct exper­imental investigation and that, for what can be reached, we may alrea­dy have the basic framework in hand."

"Isidor Rabi, on a leave from in the early 1960s, came to Princeton as a visitor to its history department. On several occasions during that year, when the elevated conversation in the history department got to be too much for him, he would drop into my office to “talk physics.” We had already by that time developed a sage-rookie relationship. “What are you up to these days?” he would begin. But when I started to tell, he would cut me and all other theorists of my generation short as mere scribblers and launch into tales of the golden days of his generation, when giants trod the earth. So they had, I knew. After all, he got started in physics as quantum mechanics was being born. This put-down was conveyed with great good humor and I was not at all discomfited; indeed I relished the barbs and the tales."

"We have no better way of describing elementary particles than quantum field theory. A quantum field in general is an assembly of an infinite number of interacting harmonic oscillators. Excitations of such oscillators are associated with particles. The special importance of the harmonic oscillator follows from the fact that its excitation spectrum is additive, i.e. if E1 and E2 are energy levels above the ground state then E1 + E2 will be an energy level as well. It is precisely this property that we expect to be true for a system of elementary particles."

"We develop a for computing sums over random surfaces which arise in all problems containing (like , three-dimensional etc.). These sums are reduced to the exactly solvable quantum theory of the two-dimensional Liouville lagrangian. At D = 26 the string dynamics is that of harmonic oscillators as was predicted earlier by dual theorists, otherwise it is described by the nonlinear integrable theory."

"... spacetime as a concept leads to some … where the equations fail. This happens in the interiors of the black holes when spacetime somehow collapses ... And, also, most importantly it happened in the beginning of the Big Bang."

"Interestingly, both quantum entanglement and s date back to two articles written by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935. On the surface, the papers seem to deal with very different phenomena, and Einstein probably never suspected that there could be a connection between them. In fact, entanglement was a property of quantum mechanics that greatly bothered the German physicist, who called it How ironic that it now may offer a to extend his relativity theory to the quantum realm."

"These of are very powerful. Let us recall the situation in flat space. If we have a massive in flat space then we can always boost to a . In AdS it is the same: if we consider the oscillating trajectory of a massive particle then we can "boost" to a frame where the particle is at rest. Thus, the moving particle does not know that is moving and, despite appearances, there is no "center" in AdS. The is part of the (as in the ) and there are several choices of Hamiltonian. Once we choose a Hamiltonian ... then we have chosen a "center" and a notion of the , in which a particle sits at this "center.""

"In most situations, the contradictory requirements of quantum mechanics and general relativity are not a problem, because either the quantum effects or the gravitational effects are so small that they can be neglected or dealt with by approximations. When the of spacetime is very large, however, the quantum aspects of gravity become significant. It takes a very large or a great concentration of mass to produce much spacetime curvature. Even the curvature produced near the sun is exceedingly small compared with the amount needed for quantum gravity effects to become apparent. Though these effects are completely negligible now, they were very important in the beginning of the big bang, which is why a quantum theory of gravity is needed to describe how the big bang started. Such a theory is also important for understanding what happens at the center of black holes, because matter there is crushed into a region of extremely high curvature. Because gravity involves spacetime curvature, a quantum gravity theory will also be a theory of quantum spacetime ..."

"It has been a long-standing challege for to construct a theory of quantum gravity. String theory is the leading candidate for a quantum theory of gravity. General Relativity has the seeds of its own destruction in it, since smooth can evolve into singular field configurations ... Classically this is not a problem if the singularities are hidden behind s ... since this means that nothing can come out from the region containing the singularity. However, Hawking showed, under very general assumptions, that quantum mechanics implies that black holes emit particles ... In his approximation this radiation is exactly thermal and contains no information about the state of the black hole. This leads to the , since particles can fall in carrying information but what comes out is featureless thermal radiation ... Hawking argued that this would lead to non-unitary evolution, so that one of the basic principles of quantum mechanics would have to be modified."

"Alexander Polyakov, a now at Princeton University, caught a glimpse of the future of in 1981. A range of mysteries, from the wiggling of strings to the binding of s into s, demanded a new mathematical tool whose silhouette he could just make out. ... In his paper he sketched out a formula that roughly described how to calculate averages of a wildly chaotic type of surface, the “.” His work brought physicists into a new mathematical arena, one essential for unlocking the behavior of theoretical objects called strings and building a simplified model of quantum gravity. Years of toil would lead Polyakov to breakthrough solutions for other theories in physics, but he never fully understood the mathematics behind the Liouville field. Over the last seven years, however, a group of mathematicians has done what many researchers thought impossible. In a trilogy of landmark publications, they have recast Polyakov’s formula using fully rigorous mathematical language and proved that the Liouville field flawlessly models the phenomena Polyakov thought it would."

"Based at Princeton University, Polyakov was chosen from a shortlist of three, which included string theorist of the and a trio of researchers – of the , of the and of Stanford University. The shortlist and ultimate winner were chosen by a panel comprising nine physicists – seven of whom are string theorists and one a topological-insulator pioneer. Not surprisingly, string-theory naysayer of Columbia University is not pleased. “The [ceremony] was largely a string theory hype-fest…,” he wrote on his blog . Meanwhile in a very different dimension of the , Lubos Motl is elated and writes “Sasha Polyakov is a giant because he is a string-theory pioneer and because he has cracked many phenomena in gauge theories.” Motl also makes a confession of sorts about what he discovered while alone in Polyakov’s office…"

"can be understood in a very simple way by means of the Peierls argument. Namely, while the energy of the string is proportional to its length, the entropy of it also grows linearly (since the number of random curves grows exponentially with their lengths). Thus at a certain temperature the entropy takes over and infinitely long strings begin to dominate. That means liberation."

"It has been observed that whereas s and s are likely to be embarrassed by references to the beauty in their work, mathematicians instead like to engage in discussions of the beauty of mathematics. Professional artists are more likely to stress the technical rather than the aesthetic aspects of their work. Mathematicians, instead, are fond of passing judgment on the beauty of their favored pieces of mathematics. Even a cursory observation shows that the characteristics of mathematical beauty are at variance with those of artistic beauty. For example, courses in “art appreciation” are fairly common; it is however unthinkable to find any “mathematical beauty appreciation” courses taught anywhere. The purpose of the present paper is to try to uncover the sense of the term “beauty” as it is currently used by mathematicians."

"The spectacular results in the fluctuation theory of sums of independent random variables, obtained in the last 15 years by , , , , , , and others, have gradually led to the realization that the nature of the problem, as well as that of the methods of solution, is algebraic and combinatorial. After Baxter showed that the crux of the problem lay in simplifying a certain operator identity, several algebraic proofs (, , Wendel) followed. It is the present purpose to carry this algebraization to the limit: the result we present amounts to a solution of the for s. The solution is not presented as an algorithm, but by showing that every identity in a Baxter algebra is effectively equivalent to an identity of symmetric functions independent of the number of variables. Remarkably, the identities used so far in the combinatorics of fluctuation theory "translate" by the present method into classical identities of easy verification. The present method is nevertheless also useful for guessing and proving new combinatorial identities: by way of example, it will be shown in the second part of this note how it leads to a generalization of the Bohnenblust-Spitzer formula for the action of arbitrary ."

"The more experimental scientists and s are, the more common sense they have, and so on until you get to the mathematicians, who are totally devoid of common sense."

"It cannot be a complete coincidence that several outstanding logicians of the twentieth century found shelter in s at some time in their lives: Cantor, , Gödel, Peano, and are some. was one of the saner among them, though in some ways his behavior must be classified as strange, even by mathematicians' standards. He looked like a cross between a and a large owl. He spoke softly in complete paragraphs which seemed to have been read out of a book, evenly and slowly enunciated, as by a . When interrupted, he would pause for an uncomfortably long period to recover the thread of the argument. He never made casual remarks: they did not belong in the baggage of ."

"When one observes the many and great changes that have occurred in some s since the beginning of the , he is inclined to the belief that a longer period of time was involved than he had been led to believe. is an example where lakes of great depth once existed in a locality that is now a true desert. Segments of giant fans, some faulted, have been built out on the dried-up lake basin. Some large s on the surface are so deeply weathered that a hammer blow will reduce them to . We are rapidly learning that certain are much more rapid than we have been wont to believe. But only recently have s attempted to determine by actual measurement process rates formerly the subject of general reasoning or speculation. Such measurement programs have documented the fact that rates of landscape change are greater than had earlier been suspected."

"To better understand how far various grains were transported by wind, she and Allen Solomon (then at the ) set a network of pollen traps near and s in the to match the pollen rain with different . These data were used to develop a pollen-vegetation calibration that still informs studies in the region and beyond."

"The evidence from and fossils indicates that , , and probably the other , are cylinders of slowly building on a sinking or ; has occurred in and younger time, and there were three major periods of emergence during which the coral rocks were weathered subaerially."

"My had developed a craving to have his own land to experiment with a new idea: '. We needed, he said, to find out what the original had been like in our area and what we could do to bring it back. That, and his desire to have a special place to hunt, led to his purchase in the mid-1930s of an abandoned farm along the , in the —"." He specifically chose the Shack land because of its isolation and because this farm was a land of impoverished soil that had become an agricultural failure. In his view this was sick land that needed restoration; it needed to see again the native species that once must have grown here. It was one instance of his larger vision of the countrywide importance of land health and fostering the community of life."

"The fate of rivers would evidently not be disregarded by Leopold’s watchful eye. In the late 1950s, he and W.B. Langbein initiated what came to be called the Vigil Network, consisting of sections in small s where natural changes would be recorded regularly. Some of these have been operating continuously for half a century, and similar schemes are in operation in Israel and Sweden. Just as productive were some of Leopold’s rafting expeditions down rivers for which he needed depth and velocity data. In 1965, he surveyed 450 km of the in this manner (and again many years later with his distinguished collaborator, the physicist, soldier, and desert explorer ). Besides feeding into the morphometric work, these investigations paved the way for a concerted attack on the problems of and , presaged in a joint study of flood control with T. Maddock Jr. in 1954 and developed with T. Dunne in 1978 and D.L. Rosgen in the 1980s."

"The excess of over loss to the is a surprisingly small percentage of the average precipitation. The average amount of water that falls as precipitation over the United States annually is 30 es. Of this total, 21 inches are returned to the atmosphere in the form of through the process of evaporation and transpiration from plants. The balance of 9 inches contributes to the maintenance of and the ."

"Over a period of ten years, simultaneous measurement of storm rainfall and resulting during individual storms were made in small basins in the , California. By simple measurement, without any recording devices, data collected define a relation of basin lag time to drainage area. This lag time, expressed as time between center of mass of rainfall and center of mass of runoff, is a specific measure of some basin characteristics including the effect of . Using lag time relations, synthetic hydrography construction shows the effect of urbanization on peak discharge from a given storm. The method applied to one storm shows that urbanization increased the peak discharge by two fold."

"s have a secret. While our research is motivated by a desire to reconstruct , it can also provide novel insights into fundamental cellular mechanisms in modern s. Studies of evolution reveal how the cell's component parts were “assembled” over time, how and why cells are vulnerable to disease and death, the molecular mechanisms that are responsible for fundamental cellular processes, and those mechanisms that distinguish the and of different lineages of organisms from each other. Studies of “evolutionary cell biology” promise to deepen our understanding of how cells function."

"... in the closing line of Darwin's ', he remarked on 'endless forms most beautiful', and he was referring to the incredible diversity of s ... much of his research and thinking had to with trying to understand: How do we get this diversity of s? And, there's been a great deal of progress in this regard, largely from the work of s, s, and s working together to try to understand what are molecular mechanistic underpinnings of the diversification of animal body plans. ... Animals are united by their shared ancestry. They all share a common ancestor … And, in fact, we know relatively little about the nature of that organism."

"The transition to that launched the evolution of animals from marks one of the most pivotal, and poorly understood, events in . Advances in and , and particularly the study of s, are yielding new insights into the biology of the unicellular progenitors of animals. and gene families critical for animal development (including s and s) evolved in protozoa before the origin of animals. Innovations in and expansions of certain gene families may have allowed the integration of cell behavior during the earliest experiments with multicellularity. The protozoan perspective on animal origins promises to provide a valuable window into the distant past and into the cellular bases of animal development."

"Scientists are very curious ... We might be curious about something that looks completely irrelevant, and it turns out to be a really amazing thing. Or it could be irrelevant. We don't know. If we knew, we wouldn't be looking at it."

"Being a woman is hard ... The expectations are that we’ll be gorgeous, completely organized, great mothers, great wives, and great professionals ... The pressures are huge. I was always expected to bring the cookies to meetings because I’m a woman. Like, men can’t find cookies? That’s why I say: Let’s be nicer to ourselves. Diversity is very important ... When you bring in new folks who ask new questions, you change the field and the basic sciences. Women want to do great research. But we’re asking, ‘Why do we have this rule? That artificial hierarchy?’ We can be more collaborative. And I’ll tell you this ... When men suggest we speak with deeper voices if we want to get our message across, here is what I say: Gravity does not care how deep your voice is."

"is that is assumed to be absolutely stable. A seed of strange matter in a will convert the star into a . The speed at which this conversion occurs is calculated. The calculation takes into account the rate at which the and s equilibrate via s and the diffusion of strange quarks towards the conversion front. The speed is found as a function of the temperature of the star and the minimum strangeness necessary for strange matter stability. The conversion can be detected as an energy release of ∼58 MeV with different luminosities for different stages of a neutron star's evolution and as a “super-glitch” on s' frequencies."

"I was really interested in the basic workings of nature: Why ? What is the unified theory of everything? But I realized how many easier questions we have in astrophysics: that you could actually take a lifetime and go answer them. Graduate school at MIT showed me the way to astrophysics — how it can be an amazing route to many questions, including how the universe looks, how it functions, and even particle physics questions. I didn’t plan to study s; but every step it was, “OK, it looks promising.”"

"The Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (POEMMA) was designed as a Astrophysics probe-class mission to identify the sources of ) and observe s from extremely energetic transient sources. POEMMA consists of two identical spacecraft flying in a loose formation at 525 km altitude oriented to view a common atmospheric volume and to provide full-sky coverage for both types of messengers. Each spacecraft hosts a wide with a hybrid focal plane optimized to observe both the UV fluorescence signal from extensive air showers (EASs) and the optical signals from EASs."

"Because of unprecedented increases in , the structure has been transformed. Linkages among family members have been prolonged, and the surviving generations in a family have increased in number and complexity. Today's kinship structure (which has no parallel in history) can be viewed in a new way: as a latent web of continually shifting linkages that provide the potential for activating and intensifying close family relationships. These relationships are no longer prescribed as strict obligations, but must be earned—created and recreated by family members over their lives. Such changes in the structure and dynamics of family relationships raise many questions and issues for students of the family including the development of special research approaches needed to understand the complexity of these relationships and the nature of older people's family relationships in the future."

"Possibly overshadowed by Matilda’s many public accomplishments is her service as a teacher and mentor at and , and the dedication and accomplishments of some of her students and menses to the study of aging and the life course, especially Anne Foner, Marilyn Johnson, and Kathleen Bond. She built a modern sociology-anthropology department at and was named the Daniel B. Fayerweather Professor of Political Economy and Sociology in 1975; in 1996 the building housing the department was named in her honor, and she received honorary doctoral degrees from (1972), Rutgers (1983), (1994), and the (1997)."

"In 1979 at the age of 68, Matilda embarked on a 20-year career at the (NIA) of the (NIH). The NIA’s founding director, , and the NIH Director, , invited Matilda to establish the NIA’s granting program on Social and Behavioral Research (SBR) as well as to guide the expansion and integration of these disciplines throughout the NIH. During her first year at the NIA, she and Kathleen Bond (one of her former graduate students) developed and implemented a multidisciplinary vision for research on aging that integrated the aging of individuals into societal structures. This program emphasized the influence of social structures on the lives of individuals (Matilda exclaimed often, “People don’t grow up and grow old in laboratories—they grow up and grow old in changing societies.”) and the lives of individuals on social structures. This vision extended to the biological sciences, for Matilda recognized the need for a biopsychosocial understanding. The publication of this blueprint as a NIH program announcement set the course of NIA’s program and influences its direction even to this day."

"Interviewing individual group members separately affords privacy and encourages all members to answer. Respondents may be more frank if that others in the group will not hear what they say (thereby removing the possibility of group sanctions). This may be the best way of obtaining responses from individuals with lower positions (younger, lower , e.g.) in the group, who might be intimidated by a group interview situation."

"Remember that, as a sociologist, your focus is on social interaction—i.e., not on the biological or psychological processes of the actors, but on their and expression to each other of their underlying orientation, feelings, and attitudes."

"... one seems forced to conclude that a disproportionally large number of the nation's "pockets of poverty" are found in rural-farm areas."

"Parents who believed in the value of "getting ahead" started to apply pressure from the beginning of the school career."

"Today's social structures and norms are the vestigial remains of the nineteenth-century, when most people died before their work was finished or their last child had left home. Age 65 was established as the criterion for —yet age 65 is still used in many countries under today's utterly changed conditions of longevity."

"emphasizes the concern for facts, the tangible aspects of the archaeological record; the development of chronological techniques; s; and writing of informed by theory; and a reluctance to make inferences about social organization. Archaeology could provide the historical continuity that challenged the cataclysms of the romantic school and allowed for the development of an anthropological science. Archaeological remains were important in their own right in the early evolutionist program. The remains provided a tangible record of the degree of mental development of various societies. The archaeological remains also provided continuity from the past to the present. The continuity is essential to the development of anthropological science which depends on an orderly universe. Observations of archaeological traits are made and comparisons are drawn among sites and regions, suggesting a scenario of culture history which might then be compared with the scenarios developed by s, linguists, and s."

"Between 1130 and 1180 a period of severe drought struck the Colorado Plateaus; this is the same time during which the appears to have disintegrated. Using the year 1150 as the beginning of the recognizes the potentially widespread importance of a real event in history; the end of building and probably, for 100 years, of occupation in . This is no small event given Chaco's role as a major center of activity, population, and exchange."

"The early history of s in has recently been addressed by Gifford and Morris (1985), who emphasize the period between 1920 and 1940 when these institutions provided nearly the only pre-professional, practical experience for archaeology students. The kinds of field classes offered by , founder of the field school, have been described by Chauvenet (1983). Field schools have a recognized long and venerable history and have provided American archaeology with many of its most acclaimed practitioners."

"While in we made four camping trips with and outboard motor, visiting Alaganik on the and sites in the Sound from to . The gave us several lifts, and in August the took us for a ten-day cruise around the Sound, stopping at , , , and other villages where we had an opportunity to talk to the natives, and also touching at a few of the ancient village sites on our route."

"The ground was thawed to a depth of thirty centimeters. For the rough work of clearing the ground the men used spades and a pickaxe, but as soon as the real excavation began produced the geological spades with little blades, which were better for the more delicate work."

"I saw several dogskins hung up to dry. On account of the scarcity of and s, the have to use dogskins for their winter furs. The dogs have fine thick fur, but nothing to compare with that of bears and caribou."

"is a in a plain of partly indurated sands and clays of age, known as the ."

"There are a number of ways in which archeology may relate to , but in any given area it may not be possible to trace such connections fully. Ideally, of course, the archeology of a people should enable the to trace the record of the culture back into the stages temporally prior to those which can be explored through ethnological techniques or historical records. Admittedly the archeological data, even under conditions of maximum preservation and most skillful excavation, will never give the complete outline of a culture. At best the picture would be equivalent to that which the ethnologist might see if he visited a village from which the inhabitants had precipitately fled, abandoning all their possessions. But such a complete inventory of material items, in associations reflecting technological processes, economic activities, social organization and other nonmaterial aspects of life, is something to which the archeologist may aspire in vain."

"The revealed the to have an unexpected richness of structure. Many of the observed features have now been identified as collective effects arising from the of the ring material. These effects include , the main topics of this review chapter. Both kinds of waves were first discussed in the astronomical literature in connection with the dynamics and structure of , and our discussion contrasts the similarities and differences between the and s. After developing the theory of free and forced waves of both types, we discuss how the observed waves can be used as diagnostics to obtain crucial parameters that characterize the physical state of the rings."