My physics teacher, Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity.

However, when my parents married in 1945, China was in turmoil and the possibility of returning grew increasingly remote, and they decided to begin their family in the United States.

While we cannot accurately predict the course of climate change in the coming decades, the risks we run if we don't change our course are enormous. Prudent risk management does not equate uncertainty with inaction.

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.

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 these gas prices. ... So, of course we don't want the price of gasoline to go up; we want it to go down.

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 unless you replace all the wiring. The job will cost $20,000... so you get an independent assessment. The next engineer agrees with the first warning. You can either continue to shop for additional evaluations until you find the one engineer in 1,000 that is willing to give you the answer you want, "Your family is not in danger" or you can change the wiring.

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 laser-cooled atoms in an atomic fountain interferometer.