30 Quotes by Eric Allin Cornell

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.

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.

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.

My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs.

My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

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.

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.

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.