For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork. - When Things Start to Think, 1999.
Neil Gershenfeld
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I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.
Albert Einstein
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Men who accomplish great things in the industrial world are the ones who have faith in the money producing power of ideas.
Charles Fillmore
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Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
Karl Marx
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... it is certain that the real function of art is to increase our self-consciousness; to make us more aware of what we are, and therefore of what the universe in which we live really is. And since mathematics, in its own way, also performs this function, it is not only aesthetically charming but profoundly significant. It is an art, and a great art.
James Joseph Sylvester
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We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea at first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.
Buckminster Fuller
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The only thing you will ever be able to say in the so-called 'social' sciences is: "some do, some don't.".
Kelvin Throop Iii
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As crude a weapon as a cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.
Rachel Carson
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You know you've achieved perfection in design,
Not when you have nothing more to add,
But when you have nothing more to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.
Henry Miller
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Thinking is the hardest work there is. Which is the probable reason why so few engage in it.
Henry Ford
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A man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. He sits on a hot stove for a minute, it's longer than any hour. That is relativity.
Albert Einstein
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Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
Chopin
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The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody
appreciates how difficult it was.
Anonymous
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Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
Archimedes
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