They said it at Scifest!

Heard at Scifest Africa in Grahamstown earlier this year:

• “My name is Stephen Ashworth. Stephen with a ‘ph’ because I’m a chemist” – Dr Stephen Ashworth

• “South Africa needs innovators. Innovation is not a foreign or frightening concept. It’s not elitist.” – Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor.

• “We’ve got some of the brightest engineers in the world working on some of the biggest challenges globally, and so we can do it” – Dr Christopher Ettmayr discussing renewable energy technology

• “We need to change our mindset, we need to get edu- cated about how best to use water.” – Prof J. Catherine Ngila

• “Mathematicians are humans after all.” – Prof Jon Davis of the Western Michigan University

• “We call it the Large Hadron Collider because it’s large” – Dr Claire Lee, a South African particle physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland

• “Nobody has particles as good as us.” - Dr Claire Lee, a particle physicist working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

• “We smash these particles together, and it’s a lot of fun.” - Dr Claire Lee confessing to a propensity for expensive vandalism