Suppose you had a small electrical fire and... a structural engineer [looked] at your home's wiring [and] reports that the wiring is "shot" and there is a 50% chance that your house would burn down in the next few years… — Steven Chu Copy Share Image
There were only two other Chinese families in this town of 25,000, but to our parents, the determining factor was the quality of the… — Steven Chu Copy Share Image
If other countries don't impose a cost on carbon, then we will be at a disadvantage...we would look at considering perhaps duties that would… — Steven Chu Copy Share Image
Since I walked in the door as secretary of energy, I've been doing everything in our powers to do what we can to reduce… — Steven Chu Copy Share Image
Occasionally, I would focus on a particular school project and become obsessed with, what seemed to my mother, to be trivial details instead of… — Steven Chu Copy Share Image
Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'être. Virtually all of our aunts and uncles had Ph.D.s in science or engineering, and it was taken for granted that the next generation of Chu's were to follow the family tradition. When the dust had settled, my two brothers and four cousins collected three MDs, four Ph.D.s… — Steven Chu Copy Share
Let me state what the official IPCC prediction is: Sea levels could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century,… — Steven Chu Copy Share Image
For the better part of my last semester at Garden City High, I constructed a physical pendulum and used it to make a "precision" measurement of gravity. The years of experience building things taught me skills that were directly applicable to the construction of the pendulum. Twenty-five years later, I was to develop a refined version of this measurement using… — Steven Chu Copy Share
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… — Steven Chu Copy Share Image
I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as a chore rather than an intellectual adventure. The tedium was relieved by a few courses that seem to be qualitatively different. Geometry was the first exciting course I remember. Instead of memorizing facts, we were asked to think in clear, logical steps. Beginning from a few intuitive postulates, far reaching consequences could… — Steven Chu Copy Share
In the summer after kindergarten, a friend introduced me to the joys of building plastic model airplanes and warships. 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. The living room rug was… — Steven Chu Copy Share
The ideal protective layer for a lithium metal anode needs to be chemically stable to protect against the chemical reactions with the electrolyte and… — Steven Chu Copy Share Image