Paul Callaghan: Dancing with Atoms

He got his energy from other people, he sparked off other people all the time. There's nothing more exciting than if you think something is really cool and then someone that you respect starts to also say it is really cool. Once he became involved with something and was invigorated by it he was a bit of a machine really.

– Professor Kathryn McGrath, who worked with Paul Callaghan at the MacDiarmid Institute, The Dominion Post, 24 March 2012

Paul was as close to a renaissance man as we're likely to find in the modern world. He of course was an absolutely committed and extraordinary knowledgeable physicist, but he could talk to people about anything.

– Professor Charles Daugherty