William D. Phillips Ph.D.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1997
Nobel co-recipients Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji

Physicist. Development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. Think about physics intuitively. Open, lively discussion of physics problems. Do physics at frontiers competitively with openness, humanity, cooperation. Excellent teacher. Religious.

"No prize can compare in importance to family and friends I count as my greatest treasures".

Humor Quotations

Excerpt from Bio
Generously contributed by William D. Phillips

Humor

"My brother Tom was born in 1957 - a concrete confirmation, my sister and I believed, of the power of prayer. We had been praying for a sibling, unaware that our parents could decide, and had decided, that two children were enough. Apparently our prayers were effective. The result was a thrill and a blessing for all of us."

"Back at Juniata for my final semester, I was applying to graduate schools. First on my list was Princeton - because I had heard its graduate program was superb and because a visitor to Juniata had told me that a physics student from my school would never be accepted to Princeton! I was accepted."

Quotations

The summer after my junior year in high school, I worked at the University of Delaware doing sputtering experiments. It was a great experience and I learned an important truth from Jim Comas, the graduate student who supervised me. "An experimental physicist," he told me, "is someone who gets paid for working at his hobby."

"Dan had seen my application to MIT. So I visited MIT (and Harvard for good measure); I was struck by the pleasant camaraderie, and the friendly yet electric atmosphere that Dan had created in his group. That emotional reaction, and [wife] Jane's desire to return to New England, more than any purely scientific considerations, made me decide to go to MIT. I never regretted that decision, or any of the other decisions I made afterwards based on considerations of the heart."

"I also learned from Dan, and from the others in his group, a way of thinking about physics intuitively, and a way of inquiring about a problem that has shaped the way I approach physics to this day. The style of open and lively discussion of physics problems that I found in Dan's group is one that I have tried to emulate in my own group at NIST. I also try to follow the principle Dan taught by example: that one can do physics at the frontiers, competing with the best in the world, and do it with openness, humanity and cooperation."

“One comes to be of just such stuff as that on which the mind is set” - Maithri Upanishath, VI.34:3

“…the peace that is found in libraries and laboratories…” - Louis Pasteur

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