Eric Allin Cornell Quotes

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.

Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

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

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.

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.

With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us.

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

I was partly old-fashioned and partly modern.

As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake.

Conversely, I came to realize that being good at something is hardly a reason to avoid doing it.

I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961.

Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read.

The 1970s, the decade of my teenage years, was a transitional period in American youth culture.

Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.

My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits.