Quotes About Innovation

Quantum mechanics is weird. I don't understand it. Just live with it. You don't have to understand the nature of things in order to build cool devices.

It's hard to build large-scale, general-purpose quantum computers. I hope that we can cross that hurdle soon and build general-purpose quantum computers with hundreds or thousands of quantum bits. But the most important hurdle is in our own understanding. Unless we can understand how the world processes information at a quantum level, we will remain in the dark.

Right now, we have small, general-purpose quantum computers that can basically do anything you ask them to, if you ask nicely. Then we have large, special-purpose quantum computers that can solve specific problems better than classical computers can. What we don't have is a large, general-purpose quantum computer of the sort that would be needed to break codes, strike fear in the heart of the National Security Agency and other three-letter agencies. Which is probably a good thing.

It's not a fantasy to explore this question about making computers that are much, much, more powerful than the kind that we have sitting around now -- in which a grain of salt has all the computational powers of all the computers in the world.

Yes, I am a quantum mechanic! Those darn quantum computers break all the time.

I string sounds together. But to string them I have to remember a bunch of old ones I heard somewhere and then juggle them into a new rhythm and shape.

My mom introduced me to science-fiction.

You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate.

Give a brief overview of the value of your idea, no more than 5 or 10 minutes. Then ask people to pair up and write on a piece of paper what would be the same or different at work if the idea were adopted. From this exercise, people begin to see the value of it on their own.

Men may move mountains, but ideas move men.

The old customs are dead, and we keep trying on new ones, like badly fitting clothes.

In all my years of coaching, I have never been successful using somebody else's play.

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

Our ape-like and arboreal ancestors entered upon the first of many short cuts. To crack a marrow-bone with a rock was the act which fathered the tool, and between the cracking of a marrow-bone and the riding down town in an automobile lies only a difference of degree.

Truths that startled the generation in which they were first announced become in the next age the commonplaces of conversation; as the famous airs of operas which thrilled the first audiences come to be played on hand-organs in the streets.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

That part of a work of one author found in another is not of itself piracy, or sufficient to support an action; a man may adopt part of the work of another; he may so make use of another's labors for the promotion of science and the benefit of the public.

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

No one person invented Mulberry. The knowledge that we had to have this floating harbor slowly grew.

It's better to read first rate science fiction than second rate science -- it's a lot more fun, and no more likely to be wrong," joked Lord Rees, Astronomer Royal and the former president of the Royal Society, at Wired 2013.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

If one could run the story of that first human group like a speeded-up motion picture through a million years of time, one might see the stone in the hand change to the flint ax and the torch.

This is an industry to not only look at, but become a part of for the future, right now in the present. It can create wealth, amplify health and help to save, sustain and grow economies while reducing our footprint. With the farm bill making it legal, again; it's time to return to hemp.