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Science, technology, and engineering... they got us out of one Dark Age, and they're helping push away the next.
Quote | Author | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Optimists say the glass is half full. Pessimists say the glass is half empty. Engineers say the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. | ||||
| I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification. | Alan Kay | |||
| The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals. | Albert A. Michelson, speech given in 1894 at the dedication of Ryerson Physics Lab, Univ. of Chicago | |||
| You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles... And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. | Albert Einstein | |||
| You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. | Albert Einstein | |||
| Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. | Arthur C. Clarke | |||
| Terrorists with leverage are scary, but I'm much more scared of nutty, cocksure attempts to build 'technology' that supposedly keeps us safe. Terrorists get tired, give up, or shoot each other over the spoils, but once the hardware's installed, a lousy technology is harder to kill off than a cockroach. | Bruce Sterling | |||
| There is one outstanding important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it. | Buckminster Fuller | |||
| In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. | Carl Sagan | |||
| Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. | Carl Sagan | |||
| They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. | Carl Sagan | |||
| Yes, [science fiction author] Arthur C. Clarke predicted communication satellites. He also predicted whale ranching. | Eric Flint | |||
| There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. | F.A. Hayek | |||
| At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation | Igor Sikorsky | |||
| Even a rather poverty stricken American of today has at his disposal more energy of more kinds than any Alexander or Caesar of the past can possibly have had. And while energy does not, of itself, bring happiness, lack of energy is very likely, of itself, to bring misery. | Isaac Asimov | |||
| The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' | Isaac Asimov | |||
| Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to cause 10,000 deaths annually in the U.S., for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal is now would require a meltdown somewhere or other every two weeks. | James P. Hogan | |||
| The [radioactive] emission from the granite that Grand Central Station is built from exceeds the permissible limit set for [the nuclear power] industry. Grand Central Station wouldn't get a license as a nuclear plant. | James P. Hogan | |||
| Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. | John F. Kennedy | |||
| He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense. | John McCarthy | |||
| There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement | Lord Kelvin, 1900 | |||
| If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. | Lyall Watson | |||
| Everybody knows that nuclear fusion can only take place at tremendously high temperatures and pressures, in the presence of billions of dollars. | L. Neil Smith | |||
| If all the money spent on ramps, bus elevators, and the like in an attempt to make the world 'wheelchair accessible' had been spent on neurological research, no one would need ramps and elevators. | L. Neil Smith | |||
| Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker. | Mar's Law | |||
| Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc^2. | Michael Crichton | |||
| There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period. | Michael Crichton | |||
| Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. | Michael Crichton | |||
| The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| If the climate science reviewers didn't see the background information, raw data, or source code, what exactly was peer reviewed? Did they just check the spelling? | Randy Lea | |||
| I think of physics as the liberal arts of technology. | Richard Muller | |||
| Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad--but not before. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| We remain strong in science and engineering but even students in those subject are handicapped by failure of our primary and secondary schools and by cutback in funding of research both public and private. Our great decline in education is alone enough to destroy this country. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy. | Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1888 | |||
| Technology is the word given to the stuff that doesn't quite work just yet. | Supercomputer designer Danny Hillis | |||
| One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. | Thomas B. Reed | |||
| I would sooner believe that two Yankee professors lied, than that stones fell from the sky. | Thomas Jefferson, 1807, after hearing an eyewitness report of falling meteorites. | |||
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