Quotes About Invention

I love the idea of creation and creativity.

It's easy to make up weird stuff. It gets trickier when you want the weird stuff to be interesting and make sense.

Innovations seem to have a life and a sentience of their own. When conditions are right, a radical new idea—a paradigm shift—may appear simultaneously from many minds at once. Or it may remain secret in the thoughts of one man for years, decades, centuries…until someone else thinks of the same thing.

I'll say I do! Can I have some of that funny-looking pie?" "Ssshh! Don't let the Abbot hear you, that's his new invention, wild cherry and glazed plum gateau with elderflower cream. He's very proud of it." "Mmmm, so he should be, tastes marvelous. D'you use paws or a spoon?" "Try using your mouth. Hahaha!

Man creates. the machine duplicates. In each case a different principle is appealed to, a different characteristic, called into being. To create is to cause to exist a thing that is unique. To duplicate is to cause to exist a thing that is uniform.

Was the Buffalo chicken wing invented when Teressa Bellissimo thought of splitting it in half and deep frying it and serving it with celery and blue-cheese dressing? Was it invented when John Young started using mambo sauce and thought of elevating wings into a specialty?

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library

Voltaire argued that if God did not exist Man would be obliged to invent him, and was reviled for the remark.

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.

We invented phonetic writing so we could put our sounds down on paper and, by glancing at a page, hear someone speaking in our head—an invention that became so widespread in the last few thousand years that we hardly ever stop to consider how astonishing it is

Let's see if I got this right, she would say to herself. I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.

In science we may start with experimental results, data, observations, measurements, 'facts'. We invent, if we can, a rich array of possible explanations and systematically confront each explanation with the facts.

The family tree of each of us is graced by all those great inventors: the beings who first tried out self-replication, the manufacture of protein machine tools, the cell, cooperation, predation, symbiosis, photosynthesis, breathing oxygen, sex, hormones, brains, and all the rest-inventions we use, some of them, minute-by-minute without ever wondering who devised them and how much we owe to these unknown benefactors, in a chain 100 billion links long.

Writing is perhaps the greatest human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.

When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovation but as a surpassing good for humanity. And assuming that we survive long enough to use their inventions wisely, I believe the same will be said of the modern Thoths and Prometheuses who are today devising computers and programs at the edge of machine intelligence.

Practitioners of pop science were once called Paradoxers, a quaint nineteenth-century word used to describe those who invent elaborate and undemonstrated explanations for what science has understood rather well in simpler terms. We

At the Stourbridge Fair in 1663, at age twenty, he purchased a book on astrology, "out of a curiosity to see what there was in it." He read it until he came to an illustration which he could not understand, because he was ignorant of trigonometry. So he purchased a book on trigonometry but soon found himself unable to follow the geometrical arguments. So he found a copy of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, and began to read. Two years later he invented the differential calculus.

It is striking that the observational search for extraterrestrial life began in the same generation as the invention of the telescope, and with the greatest theoretician of the age.

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library. A

In addition, human beings have, in the most recent few tenths of a percent of our existence, invented not only extra-genetic but also extrasomatic knowledge: information stored outside our bodies, of which writing is the most notable example.

La escritura es quizás la mayor invención humana. Une a gente que nunca se conoció. Ciudadanos de épocas distantes. Los libros rompen las cadenas del tiempo. Un libro es la prueba de que los humanos son capaces de hacer magia

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time — proof that humans can work magic.

T]he creativity of the human creature is such that genuinely new realities are regularly brought into being.