Quotes from Walter Isaacson

was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me," he recalled. "If a person falls freely, he will not feel his own weight." That realization, which "startled" him, launched him on an arduous eight-year effort to generalize his special theory of relativity and "impelled me toward a theory of gravitation."16 Later, he would grandly call it "the happiest* thought in my life.

Steve Jobs built on the work of Alan Kay, who built on Doug Engelbart, who built on J. C. R. Licklider and Vannevar Bush.

in the present situation we must support a supranational organization of force rather than advocate the abolition of all forces

Time cannot be absolutely defined, and there is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity." More

Zhang was at Harvard at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg, and it's interesting to speculate on which of them will end up having the most impact on the world. It's a proxy for the larger question, which future historians will answer, of whether the digital revolution or the life-science revolution will end up being the more important.

He tried to maintain a middle ground between those who were reflexively anti-American and those who were reflexively anti-Soviet.

I've always been," he wrote, "full of whims and mischief, and as moody as ever!

Friends were surprised that a sensuous and handsome man such as Einstein, who could have almost any woman fall for him, would find himself with a short and plain Serbian who had a limp and exuded an air of melancholy. "I would never be brave enough to marry a woman unless she were absolutely healthy," a fellow student said to him. Einstein replied, "But she has such a lovely voice.

I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals or would sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation

frequented many parlors of the mind. But he shied away from the inner chambers of the heart.

the microchip, the computer, and the internet. When these three innovations were combined, the digital revolution was born.

RNA interference operates by deploying an enzyme known as "Dicer." Dicer snips a long piece of RNA into short fragments. These little fragments can then embark on a search-and-destroy mission: they seek out a messenger RNA molecule that has matching letters, then they use a scissors-like enzyme to chop it up. The genetic information carried by that messenger RNA is thus silenced.

Don't fight over divvying up the proceeds until you finish robbing the stagecoach.

Later that year, a similar note left for her added, "If you don't mind, I'd like to come over this evening to read with you.

With his special theory of relativity, Einstein had shown that space and time did not have independent existences, but instead formed a fabric of spacetime.

The good men may do separately," he wrote, "is small compared with what they may do collectively.

Would you win the hearts of others, you must not seem to vie with them, but to admire them. Give them every opportunity of displaying their own qualifications, and when you have indulged their vanity, they will praise you in turn and prefer you above others . . . Such is the vanity of mankind that minding what others say is a much surer way of pleasing them than talking well ourselves."6

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

when truth has fair play, it will always prevail over falsehood.

Silicon Valley The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s.

The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant called him the "new Prometheus" for stealing the fire of heaven. He quickly became not only the most celebrated scientist in America and Europe, but also a popular hero. In solving one of the universe's greatest mysteries, he had conquered one of nature's most terrifying dangers.

The curving and rippling fabric of spacetime explained gravity, its equivalence to acceleration, and, Einstein asserted, the general relativity of all forms of motion.

My little Johnnie, Because I like you so much, and because you're so far away that I can't give you a little kiss, I'm writing this letter to ask if you like me as much as I do you? Answer me immediately. A thousand kisses from your Dollie—

We have 100,000 people in the U.S. affected by sickle cell," one senator pointed out. "How are we going to afford that if it's $1 million per patient? That just breaks the bank.