Quotes from Walter Isaacson

Scientists who proclaim that space comes to an end somewhere are under some obligation to tell us what lies beyond it.

Mi principio inquebrantable es esforzarme en amar la verdad y a Dios por encima de la fama y la gloria —afirmaba—. El suyo es amar la verdad y a Dios, pero amar aún más la fama, la gloria y los honores.

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard," according to Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist.

The Library Company thrives to this day. With 500,000 books and 160,000 manuscripts, it remains a significant historical repository and is the oldest cultural institution in the United States.

Thomas Cech (pronounced "check") of the University of Colorado in Boulder, who was using X-ray crystallography in order to explore each nook and cranny of the structure of RNA.

Queremos que, cuando abras la caja de un iPhone o de un iPad, la experiencia táctil condicione cómo vas a percibir el dispositivo, señaló.

I do not know how the Third World War will be fought," he answered, "but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks.

singularity, a term that von Neumann coined and the futurist Ray Kurzweil and the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge popularized, which is sometimes used to describe the moment when computers are not only smarter than humans but also can design themselves to be even supersmarter, and will thus no longer need us mortals.

Among the many surprising things about the life of Albert Einstein was the trouble he had getting an academic job.

A century after his great triumphs, we are still living in Einstein's universe, one defined on the macro scale by his theory of relativity and on the micro scale by a quantum mechanics that has proven durable even as it remains disconcerting.

Para castigarme por mi desprecio a la autoridad, el Destino me ha convertido en autoridad a mí mismo.

Doudna's mission when she arrived at the University of Colorado as a postdoc was to map the intron that Cech had discovered could be a self-splicing piece of RNA, showing all of its atoms, bonds, and shapes.

That is a challenging concept. We can visualize a curved line or surface, but it is hard to imagine what curved three-dimensional space would be like, much less a curved four dimensions. But for mathematicians, extending the concept of curvature into different dimensions is easy, or at least doable. This involves using the concept of the metric, which specifies how to calculate the distance between two points in space.

Elbridge Gerry, arguing against a large standing army, lasciviously compared it to a standing penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think," he said.

He made imaginative leaps and discerned great principles through thought experiments rather than by methodical inductions based on experimental data. The theories that resulted were at times astonishing, mysterious, and counterintuitive, yet they contained notions that could capture the popular imagination: the relativity of space and time, E=mc2, the bending of light beams, and the warping of space. Adding

Podía construir ecuaciones complejas, pero lo más importante era que sabía que las matemáticas constituyen el lenguaje que usa la naturaleza para describir sus maravillas

The Jew who abandons his faith," he once said, "is in a similar position to a snail that abandons his shell. He is still a snail."68

Unlike many other countries around the world, this great nation we live in supports and does not stigmatize entrepreneurial risk-taking.

Indeed, most of their letters mixed romantic effusions with scientific enthusiasms, often with an emphasis on the latter.

Licklider helped chart that course back in 1960 in his paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis," which proclaimed: "Human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. And the Scripture assures me that at the last day we shall not be examined by what we thought, but what we did . . . that we did good to our fellow creatures.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think," he said.55 One

According to a tale recorded by James McHenry of Maryland, he made his point in a pithier way to an anxious lady named Mrs. Powel, who accosted him outside the hall. What type of government, she asked, have you delegates given us? To which he replied, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it.