Quotes from William Rosen

The brain is evolutionarily hard-wired to do its best daydreaming only when it senses that it is safe to do so—when, in short, it is relaxed. In Kounios's words, "The relaxation phase is crucial.5 That's why so many insights happen during warm showers." Or during Sunday afternoon walks on Glasgow Green, when the idea of a separate condenser seems to have excited the aSTG in the skull of James Watt. Eureka indeed.

Rats, even dead rats, are as familiar to sailors as sunburn. Or fleabites.

Incised in the stone over the Herbert C. Hoover Building's north entrance is the legend that, with Lincoln's characteristic brevity, sums up the single most powerful idea in the world: THE PATENT SYSTEM ADDED THE FUEL OF INTEREST TO THE FIRE OF GENIUS

In 531, Tribonian authored a regulation that required that before any trial or hearing could begin, everyone, including litigants and officials, was obliged to swear an oath of Christian faith while placing a hand on a copy of the Gospels…a requirement made easier by another regulation that ordered a copy of the Gospels placed in every courtroom.

The average person in William Shakespeare's time lived no better than his counterpart in Homer's time.

Boulton's strategic plan was on schedule. He had discerned an opportunity; had exploited it;* and was soon enough unsatisfied by it. By the end of 1782, he had identified the next conquest for the steam engine, an arena whose potential dwarfed that of the mining industry: wheels.

IT IS NO ACCIDENT that "wheels of industry" is such a cliché description of a manufacturing economy, since the application of force in the form of rotational motion is by far the most important component of useful work. In late eighteenth-century Britain, the wheels that mattered most were the ones turning the mills that ground the nation's grain, and the ones that spun the nation's cloth. Most of them used water; some used wind. None used steam.

The Albion Mills was London's first factory, and its first great symbol of industrialization; its construction inaugurated not only the great age of steam-driven factories,* but also the doomed though poignant resistance to them.

One lesson of the Luddite rebellion specifically, and the Industrial Revolution generally, is that maintaining the prosperity of those closed communities—their pride in workmanship as well as their economic well-being—can only be paid for by those outside the communities: by society at large.

Smith argued that two conditions were necessary for labor to produce the maximum amount of wealth: perfect competition among sellers—everyone pursuing his or her selfish interest, the famous "invisible hand"—and the complete freedom of buyers to substitute one commodity for another.

Perversely, the greatest triumph in medical history—the germ theory of disease—destroyed the ideal of heroic medicine, replacing it with a kind of therapeutic fatalism.* As physicians were taught the bacterial causes of diseases, they also learned that there was little if nothing to do once a patient acquired one.

By the 1990s, Ericsson's research was demonstrating2 that the same phenomenon he had first discovered among concert violinists also applied to the creation of innovations: that the cost of becoming consistently productive at creative inventing is ten thousand hours of practice—five to seven years—just as it is for music, athletics, and chess.

invention inevitably followed a four-step sequence: Awareness of an unfulfilled need; Recognition of something contradictory or absent in existing attempts to meet the need, which Usher called an "incomplete pattern"; An all-at-once insight about that pattern; and A process of "critical revision" during which the insight is tested, refined, and perfected.

The hands of a pianist, or a painter, or a sushi chef, or even, as with Thomas Newcomen, hands that could use a hammer to shape soft iron, are truly, in any functional sense,

every time the brain calculates the area of a rectangle, or sight-reads a piece of music, or tests an experimental hypothesis, the neurons involved are chemically changed to make it easier to travel the same path again. Kandel's research seems to have identified that repetition forms the chains that Polanyi called tacit knowing, and that James Watt called "the correct modes of reasoning.

In 528, still the crown prince, not yet king, Khusro discovered that his father's Mazdakite allies were conspiring against the throne. Driven, perhaps, by a combination of loyalty, anger, and a desire to demonstrate a kingly sort of resolution, in 529 the prince arrested, tortured, and executed Mazdak, and followed up with a massacre of his followers. (The Mazdakites would one day serve as inspiration for Islam's dissident Shi'a.)

In 529, as part of an imperial ban against pagan education,17 the Academy was shut down, and while the members of its faculty were offered pensions and resettlement, seven of them—Damascius, the Academy's head; Simplicius; Eulamius; Priscian; Hermeias; Diogenes; and Isidore—were recruited by Khusro to re-create the Academy at the Sassanid capital city of Ctesiphon, there to translate the works of Plato and his successors into Persian.

The most disgraceful thing for kings is to disdain learning and be afraid of science.

new ruler occupied himself largely with reforming Persia: its administration, its army, its treasury, and its capital. To Khusro, such categories were not discrete. One of the relatively few maxims that can be reliably attributed to him reads, "The throne depends on the army, the army on revenue, revenue on agriculture, and agriculture on justice.

His dekkan system was not merely preserved by Persia's Arab conquerors but would eventually appear as the model for European feudal vassalage (more because of convergence than shared ancestry).

Newcomen spent ten years experimenting with solutions to the problem of maintaining a regular and stable motion in his engine. None of his solutions was more innovative than his so-called plug rod.

Until the first antibiotics, medicine remained the oldest art. It had yet to become, in Thomas's words, the "youngest science.

The European rabbit flea is so synchronized with its host that a female flea only gestates when living on a pregnant doe; when the doe gives birth, so does the flea, and the new fleas find a happy home on the baby rabbit.

A few thousand Europeans, no matter how inventive their work in chemicals, or metallurgy, could not create an Industrial Revolution unless they could inspire (or borrow, or even steal) from one another;