Popularity: 2
Vote:   | A key issue in rocket design is to make sure that the center of mass is well forward from the fins, lest the rocket be aerodynamically unstable. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | A second legacy of my brief childhood infatuation with computers was a life-long secret preference for programming in Basic, although during my years of apprenticeship in other scientists' labs I was compelled to learn both C and Fortran. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Also in the mid-90s, Dana Anderson and I began a project to construct waveguides for matter waves. Our first successes were based on hollow glass fibers, but our ongoing collaboration now focuses on guiding atoms with the magnetic fields from lithographically patterned wires. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | As a freshman I needed to earn a little money and I was looking for a way to learn about science at the same time. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Conversely, I came to realize that being good at something is hardly a reason to avoid doing it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | During those early years in Boulder, I spent a lot of time trying to imagine what a Bose-Einstein condensate would be like, if we could ever make one. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | For the remainder of my years at Stanford I worked afternoons and summers for low-temperature physics groups on campus. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I certainly remember building model rockets. It was fun to watch the rocket blast into the air, suspenseful to wonder if the parachute would open to bring the rocket safely back. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I designed an over-sized, under-powered, clunky sort of rocket. I didn't care how high it would go - I wanted it to rise slowly enough that I could watch to see if its orientation wobbled during the flight. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I didn't really enjoy the assembling the model kits very much, and usually I couldn't be bothered to paint the thing, or even to stick on the decals. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I have been fortunate also to live in a society that values scientific research, and is willing to support people to do it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I have been very fortunate over the years in the graduate students and postdocs who have come to work in my lab. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I really enjoyed this experience, and it was these jobs, more than anything else, that persuaded me to pursue a career in scientific research. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I started off building some data acquisition electronics for a scanning magnetometer, sharing a lab bench with a fellow undergraduate, Charlie Marcus. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I was partly old-fashioned and partly modern. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | In 1993, Celeste Landry and I rekindled an old romance and we were married in January of 1995, in the Stanford Faculty Club. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In the mid-1990s I ran a secondary research project in parallel with my BEC effort. The idea was to extend the techniques of laser cooling into solid-state systems. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Indeed in elementary school I often kept my desktop slightly open and affected an alert-looking pose that still allowed me to peek into the desk where I kept open my latest book, as interesting as it was irrelevant to the academic subject at hand. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It was there I met my future wife, Celeste Landry, although our lives took us separate ways for many years and we were not to marry until more than ten years later. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Most lately my group has been pursuing studies of quantized vortices in BEC and of spin-waves in ultra-cold atoms. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | My mother taught me to read when I was still quite young, and at least in my memory I passed the majority of my childhood reading. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Six months after that, I left Taiwan, first for Hong Kong and then for mainland China, where I spent another three months studying still more Chinese and generally kicking around the country. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | So the summer following my second year of college, I went off to the YMCA in Taichung, Taiwan, to teach conversational English. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Some of my classes in high school were pretty interesting and I benefited from having several very intelligent and inspiring teachers. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Superfluidity and lasing were two of my favorite topics in physics, but each was surrounded by a vast thicket of lore and literature. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The 1970s, the decade of my teenage years, was a transitional period in American youth culture. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The bulk of my group's research efforts over the last seven years has focused on elucidating the properties of BEC. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The environment at JILA for doing AMO research was so strong, I decided to accept their offer and remain, against the advice of several people who pointed out the potential risks of remaining in the shadow of my postdoctoral advisor. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The family, including my younger brother and sister, accompanied my father on sabbatical years to Berkeley, California and Lisbon, Portugal. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The idea was to trap a single ion in a Penning trap, measure its cyclotron frequency to great accuracy, then swap in a different species of ion and do a comparison measurement. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The postdoc explained to me how to distinguish different sorts of particles on the basis of the amounts of energy they deposited in various sorts of detectors, spark chambers, calorimeters, what have you. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The truth is that first year at Stanford was a shock anyway, although not for academic reasons. Everyone was beautiful, self-confident, self-satisfied. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There were hints, in those days, that the neutrino might have a rest mass as large as ten eV, a value of cosmological significance. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Thus it was that when my five years of grad school were over, while I had come nowhere near to finding the Universe's missing mass, I still felt enthused enough about physics research to proceed on to a postdoc. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Without the transitional year at Lowell, my first year as an undergraduate at Stanford would have been a horrible shock. |