Quotes About Engineering

The self-driving car revolution was kicked off by The 'DARPA' Grand Challenge to make an autonomous car traverse 132 mi. of a desert.

I found that cardiovascular exercise boosts my mental performance. If I have a problem to solve, like an engineering one, and I get on a treadmill, then time disappears; all I know is an hour later I'm all sweaty and the problem has been solved.

Despite the never-ending debate on the question of the role of government in America, there's been a strong tradition of protecting our undisputed, important natural treasures or taking on great common engineering challenges.

Because they are so humbled by their creations, engineers are naturally conservative in their expectations of technology. They know that the perfect system is the stuff of science fiction, not of engineering fact, and so everything must be treated with respect.

Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It's considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.

I, in fact, have been involved in the construction of and the management of wastewater treatment plants.

Trees and bones are constantly reforming themselves along lines of stress. This algorithm has been put into a software program that's now being used to make bridges lightweight, to make building beams lightweight.

They don't hand out Ph.D.s in test piloting, but you pick up a tremendous amount of scientific and engineering knowledge along the way. After all, when you take up a brand new plane and put it through its paces to see if it will hang together, you are really flying somebody's theory.

For me, muscle cars are a tribute to American ingenuity.

Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.

History engineered if the facts couldn't be generally accepted.

The first time you do something, it's science. The second time, it's engineering. The third time, it's just being a technician. I'm a scientist. Once I do something, I want to do something else.

The optimist says the glass is half full. The pessimist says the glass is half empty. The engineer says the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

There's nothing particularly "theoretically derived" about this neural net; it's just something that—back in 1998—was constructed as a piece of engineering, and found to work. (Of course, that's not much different from how we might describe our brains as having been produced through the process of biological evolution.)

(Miele) really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.

Building software implies various stages of planning, preparation and execution that vary in kind and degree depending on what's being built. [...] Building a four-foot tower requires a steady hand, a level surface, and 10 undamaged beer cans. Building a tower 100 times that size doesn't merely require 100 times as many beer cans.

Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.

My whole life had been designing computers I could never build.

By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size.

There's a kind of beauty to a skyscraper.

There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule. Its burnished aluminum feels cool against your lips, and if you hold it level to the light you can see God's most perfect right angle in each of its corners.

The Soyuz is probably only slightly smaller than the Dragon.

I think one problem we've had is that people who are smart and creative and innovative as engineers went into financial engineering.

Someone who's a really good engineer is someone who's a little bit smarter than you but who also listens to you and doesn't impose agendas.