William Phillips
Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist
William Phillips is a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In 1997, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light, along with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. His work on laser cooling has been instrumental in making atomic clocks more reliable. Among other awards, Phillips has received the 1996 Albert A. Michelson Medal (Franklin Institute) for his experimental demonstrations of laser cooling and atom trapping.
One of the greatest things about being a scientist is that you’re continually surprised.
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Certain ways of interpreting certain scriptures have been made obsolete by science—but that in no way makes religious faith or belief in God obsolete
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Become a Nobel laureate means you end up “meeting people who are actually famous.”
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It’s unlikely we’ll ever get all thermal motion to stop in an object. But we can get close enough in many experiments that “it’s basically absolute zero for all practical […]
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A conversation with the physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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15 min
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Because of William Phillips’ work in laser cooling, atomic clocks are almost a thousand times better than they used to be.
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