Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If read more

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.

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other read more

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.

A satellite has no conscience.

A satellite has no conscience.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and read more

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we read more

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.

The secret of science is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything read more

The secret of science is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything else that marks the man of genius in the scientific world.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate read more

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.