“After earning my Ph.D., I stayed at the Max-Planck Institute as a post...” — Wolfgang Ketterle Quote

“After earning my Ph.D., I stayed at the Max-Planck Institute as a postdoc, working on laser excitation of Rydberg states of triatomic hydrogen and helium hydride. I also succeeded in analyzing all the emission spectra of helium hydride, which I had discovered during my Ph.D.”

“Maybe if you win a Nobel Prize in economics, you make a lot of money by giving talks... but not in my area.”

“To go below one nanokelvin is like running a mile below four minutes for the first time.”

“Explorations into chemistry were done in our basement, sometimes with friends, and my parents must have had quite a bit of confidence in my abilities when they allowed me to experiment with explosive mixtures.”

“Laser cooling opened a new route to ultralow temperature physics. Laser cooling experiments, with room temperature vacuum chambers and easy optical access, look very different from cryogenic cells with multi-layer thermal shielding around them.”

“Black holes provide theoreticians with an important theoretical laboratory to test ideas. Conditions within a black hole are so extreme, that by analyzing aspects of black holes we see space and time in an exotic environment, one that has shed important, and sometimes perplexing, new light on their fundamental nature.”

“I think when you start analyzing trends and start making shows for a particular audience, you are making a fatal move. I think that's why people are doing too many revivals, that's why there's a plethora of rock musicals. There's room for everything, but not room for too much of anything.”

“My college coach was a baseball guy. So why is no one questioning why a baseball player is coaching or analyzing softball when the reverse happens?”

“By magnifying and analyzing your missteps, you learn faster.”

“When I decided to take writing seriously, I did a lot of reading and analyzing of the books I liked, and came up with what I thought were pretty sound plotting and structure basics.”