Quotes from Walter Isaacson

1956 conference at Dartmouth organized by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, where the field of artificial intelligence was launched.

If I were a young man again and had to decide how to make a living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher," he intoned to Theodore White of the Reporter magazine. "I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler, in the hope of finding that modest degree of independence still available.

Einstein's theory produced a law of the photoelectric effect that was experimentally testable: the energy of emitted electrons would depend on the frequency of the light according to a simple mathematical formula involving Planck's constant.

His success came from questioning conventional wisdom, challenging authority, and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane.

Darwin and Wallace had a key trait that is a catalyst for creativity: they had wide-ranging interests and were able to make connections between different disciplines.

He would aim for simplicity and beauty, and beauty for him was, after all, essentially simplicity.

Wielding imaging techniques such as X-ray crystallography, which is what Rosalind Franklin used to find evidence of the structure of DNA, structural biologists try to discover the three-dimensional shape of molecules. Linus Pauling worked out the spiral structure of proteins in the early 1950s, which was followed by Watson and Crick's paper on the double-helix structure of DNA.

In 1958 a Cornell professor, Frank Rosenblatt, attempted to do this by devising a mathematical approach for creating an artificial neural network like that of the brain, which he called a Perceptron.

Until then, electricity had been thought to involve two types of fluids, called vitreous and resinous, that could be created independently. Franklin's discovery that the generation of a positive charge was accompanied by the generation of an equal negative charge became known as the conservation of charge and the single-fluid theory of electricity.

The easiest of these viruses to study are the ones that attack bacteria, and they were dubbed (remember the term, for it will reappear when we discuss the discovery of CRISPR) "phages," which was short for "bacteriophages," meaning bacteria-eaters.

At Boston Macworld, as Gates discusses their deal: "That was my worst and stupidest staging event ever. It made me look small.

Harvard professor I. Bernard Cohen has pronounced, "Franklin's law of conservation of charge must be considered to be of the same fundamental importance to physical science as Newton's law of conservation of momentum.

This wariness of authority reflected the most fundamental of all of Einstein's moral principles: Freedom and individualism are necessary for creativity and imagination to flourish. He had demonstrated this as an impertinent young thinker, and he proclaimed the principle clearly in 1931. "I believe that the most important mission of the state is to protect the individual and to make it possible for him to develop into a creative personality," he said.69

His head-snapping insight was that gravity could be defined as the curvature of spacetime, and thus it could be represented by a metric tensor.

Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.

While others continued to develop quantum mechanics, undaunted by the uncertainties at its core, Einstein persevered in his lonelier quest for a more complete explanation of the universe—a unified field theory that would tie together electricity and magnetism and gravity and quantum mechanics.

As Diderot once quipped, a deist is someone who has not lived long enough to become an atheist.

Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing native luster about them which cannot be perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame, that cannot be painted." While

Despite a few childhood squabbles, Maja was to become her brother's most intimate soul mate.

Algunas teorías científicas dependen primordialmente de la inducción, es decir, de analizar un montón de hallazgos experimentales y luego encontrar teorías que expliquen las pautas empíricas.

The FDA finally relented on Saturday, February 29, and announced that it would allow non-government labs to use their own tests as they waited to get Emergency Use Authorizations. That Monday, Greninger's lab tested thirty patients. Within a few weeks, it would be testing more than 2,500 a day.

Man stands on this diminutive earth, gazes at the myriad stars and upon billowing oceans and tossing trees—and wonders. What does it all mean? How did it come about?

There is in all humans, however, a desire and a deeply felt duty to worship a more intimate God

Otras dependen más de la deducción, esto es, de empezar partiendo de principios y postulados elegantes que se consideran sagrados, y luego deducir las consecuencias de ellos.