Steven Chu
Steven Chu
Steven Chuis an American physicist who is known for his research at Bell Labs and Stanford University in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, along with his scientific colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth28 February 1948
CountryUnited States of America
curiosity branches way
Science is really about describing the way the universe works in one aspect or another in all branches of science-how a life-form works, how this works, how that works. ... You have to have a natural curiosity for that.
atoms lasers intensity
The atoms become like a moth, seeking out the region of higher laser intensity.
adventure intellectual funny-travel
I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as a chore rather than an intellectual adventure.
brother two degrees
I'm the least-educated person in my immediate family. My two other brothers have multiple advanced degrees, and I only have one. [...] Actually, now that I've got a Nobel Prize, I feel equal.
my-family raison-detre
Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'etre.
agriculture world today
So imagine a world 6 degrees warmer. It's not going to recognize geographical boundaries. It's not going to recognize anything. So agriculture regions today will be wiped out.
lying opportunity age
As the saying goes, the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones; we transitioned to better solutions. The same opportunity lies before us with energy efficiency and clean energy.
europe gasoline levels
Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.
dream kings character
I've always been inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, who articulated his Dream of an America where people are judged not by skin color but "by the content of their character." In the scientific world, people are judged by the content of their ideas. Advances are made with new insights, but the final arbitrator of any point of view are experiments that seek the unbiased truth, not information cherry picked to support a particular point of view.
adequately american-scientist average cumulative decidedly highest older performance performed record
I performed adequately at school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre.
country thinking years
The biggest gains, in terms of decreasing the country's energy bill, the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, and our dependency on foreign oil, will come from energy efficiency and conservation in the next 20 years. Make no doubt about it. That's where everybody who has really thought about the problem thinks the biggest gains can be and should be.
moving numbers design
By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size.
mean beer important
Just refrigerator efficiency saves more energy than all that we're generating from renewables, excluding hydroelectric power... I cannot impress upon you how important energy efficiency is. It doesn't mean you eat lukewarm food and your beers are lukewarm. You can still have it; you just make a better thing
country ocean thinking
I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes. This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. The island states in the world represent - I remember this number - one-half of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the world. And they will - some of them will disappear.