23 Quotes by Wolfgang Ketterle

I think both running and science reflect certain character traits. I have endurance, patience, and ambition. I'm willing to work hard toward a goal, to push myself and overcome limits. Running and science both let me express these traits.

Imagine how many aspects of nature we would miss if we lived on the surface of the sun. Without inventing refrigerators, we would only know gaseous matter and never observe liquids or solids, and miss the beauty of snowflakes.

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.

My explorations of the technical world started with Legos, with which I was quite creative in constructing moving objects with the basic building blocks that were then available.

Running is a way for me to relax. With one hour of intense running, I can get a lot of physical exercise. I can relax my body. I feel a tension in my muscles when I don't run. In that sense, I need to get out a few times a week in order to do my work as a scientist, which involves a lot of sitting still.

When air is hot, the molecules move fast and they have high kinetic energy. The colder the molecules are, the smaller their velocities are and, subsequently, their energy. Temperature is simply a way to characterize the energy of a system.

When I run, I think about everything: physics, family problems, plans for the weekend. I haven't made any big discoveries on a run, but it does give me time to think through problems. Some solutions are obvious, but they are only obvious when you are relaxed enough to find them.

When I was around thirty, I met my own personal challenge and finished a few marathons under three hours, and I have completed many long bicycle tours.

When I was running the marathons in Munich, I always trained by myself. Between the demands of graduate work and a young family, I had to train at unusual hours. A few times, I ran home from my lab late at night, which was 20 kilometers out of town.