Quotes About Innovation

Neal Stephenson

as normally solved by engineers, would require any number of perfectly reasonable but aesthetically displeasing approximations. Lawrence's solution would provide exact results.

Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning's sake—which was how it ought to be.

We are technocrats. We make decisions like engineers. Which doesn't always line up with what people imagine they want.

None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts.

In the view of Hollywood, the techies of Silicon Valley were just a particularly naive form of talent.

Do you remember the total eclipse of 3680 when we made a camera obscura so we could see it without burning our eyes?" "A box," I recalled, "with a pinhole at one end and a sheet of white paper at the other.

pauses for a moment to get the answer queued up in his output buffer.

That's the thing about space," she said. "So many smart people are so interested in it that it's difficult to come up with a really new idea.

mailing list, which is where all of the cool guys like John Cantrell hang out to discuss the very latest hashing algorithms and pseudo-random-number generators.

And he'd realized computers could be a tool to unite society.

In the old days a proposed system would have been given a three-letter acronym and bounced back and forth between different agencies and contractors for fifteen years before being launched into space.

Her coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through the electropigment like an oil slick, and then it's black.

How does a poor country defeat rich ones?" "Indeed, the answer is not by acquiring wealth in the sense that France has it." "Meaning vineyards, farms, peasants, cows?" "But rather to play a sort of trick and redefine wealth to mean something novel." "Currency!" "Indeed.

Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous.

They could not see what they could not imagine

Cruft is forever. If you peel back the layers that have grown on top of other layers, and keep delving, and grep deep enough, you're going to find base code that was written by some Linux geek in the 1980s or something. File system primitives. Memory allocation routines that were made to run on hacked single-core IBM PCs that had never heard of the Internet.

The process of creation starts with thought—an idea, conception, visualization. Everything you see was once someone's idea. Nothing exists in your world that did not first exist as pure thought.

When we got together we would start projects: an alarm clock torn apart and distributed over a wall, a stop-motion video of Lego people having sex, a Web site for pictures of toilets.

Great, excellent," the guy had said. "You other people are out of a job! Heh heh. Learn comp sci.

I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.

Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination

Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.

Our academic system rewards people who know a lot of stuff and generally we call those people smart, but at the end of the day who do you want- the person who can figure things out that they've never seen before or the person who can rattle off a bunch of facts?