Quotes by Engineers - Page 17

Extreme night shift work in high altitude astronomy is easily avoidable by using a split night shift where the first night shift starts before sunset and finishes at midnight and the second night shift starts with a new fresh person working through to after sunrise.
Steven Magee
Research suggests that sea level adapted humans that work at the very high altitude 13,796 feet summit of Mauna Kea may eventually develop sleep apnea and fatigue from the low oxygen environment.
Steven Magee
Even if ninety-nine percent of what you discover is later proven wrong, it is the one percent that is right that matters.
Steven Magee
Very high altitude extreme night shift work is a class 2A carcinogen that may result in lifelong disabling sleep disorders, high cholesterol, radiation sickness and heart, lung and brain damage.
Steven Magee
A mathematician believes that describing the speed of Mercury with equations amounts to science.
Bill Gaede
A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.
Bill Gaede
Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.
Neil Armstrong
Stephenson had large wrought-iron boiler plates available and he also had the courage of his calculations... The idea found its best-known expression in the Menai railway bridge opened in 1850. Stephenson's beams, which weighed 1,500 tons each, were built beside the Straits and were floated into position between the towers on rafts across a swirling tide. They were raised rather over a hundred feet up the towers by successive lifts with primitive hydraulic jacks. All this was not done without both apprehension and adventure; they were giants on the earth in those days.
J.E. Gordon
(T)he increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts.
Galileo Galilei
Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.
William Thomson
Since 1849 I have studied incessantly, under all its aspects, a question which was already in my mind since 1832. I confess that my scheme is still a mere dream, and I do not shut my eyes to the fact that so long as I alone believe it to be possible, it is virtually impossible. ... The scheme in question is the cutting of a canal through the Isthmus of Suez. This has been thought of from the earliest historical times, and for that very reason is looked upon as impracticable. Geographical dictionaries inform us indeed that the project would have been executed long ago but for insurmountable obstacles. [On his inspiration for the Suez Canal.]
Ferdinand de Lesseps
The steam engine has done much more for science than science has done for the steam engine.
William Thomson
There's no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don't think this is merely coincidental. It cries out for another explanation, an explanation that... points to purpose and intelligent design in the cosmos.
Guillermo González
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.
William Thomson
Science isn't just about blowing things up. Rather it's about blowing things up and knowing how you did it.
William Gurstelle
Life off Earth is in two important respects not at all unworldly: you can choose to focus on the surprises and pleasures, or the frustrations. And you can choose to appreciate the smallest scraps of experience, the everyday moments, or to value only the grandest, most stirring ones.
Chris Hadfield
I have been in my bed for five weeks, oppressed with weakness and other infirmities from which my age, seventy four years, permits me not to hope release. Added to this (proh dolor! [O misery!]) the sight of my right eye — that eye whose labors (dare I say it) have had such glorious results — is for ever lost. That of the left, which was and is imperfect, is rendered null by continual weeping.
Galileo Galilei
Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.
Galileo Galilei
Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.
Galileo Galilei
Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.
Galileo Galilei
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
Galileo Galilei
All men are equal before fish.
Herbert Hoover
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo Galilei
Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted fie thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time.
Liu Cixin
A newly formed planet appeared on the large screen. its surface was till red-hot, like a piece of charcoal fresh out of the furnace. Time passed at the rate of geological eras, and the planet gradually cooled. The color and patterns on the surface slowly shifted in a hypnotic manner. A few minutes later, an orange planet appeared on the screen, indicating the end of the simulation run."The computations were done at the coarsest level; to do it with more precision would require over a month." Green Glasses moved the mouse and zoomed in on the surface of the planet. The view swept over a broad desert, over a cluster of strangely shaped, towering mountain peaks, over a circular depression like an impact crater."What are we looking at?" Yang Dong asked."Earth. Without life, this is what the surface of the planet would look like now.""But . . . where are the oceans?""There are no oceans. No rivers either. The entire surface is dry.""Your'e saying that without life, liquid water would not exist on Earth?""The reality would probably be even more shocking. Remember, this is only a coarse simulation, but at least you can see how much of an impact life had in the present state of the Earth.""But--""Do you think life is nothing but a fragile, thin, soft shell clinging to the surface of this planet?""Isn't it?""Only if you neglect the power of time. If a colony of ants continue to move clods the size of grains of rice, they could remove all of Mount Tai in a billion years. As long as you give it enough time, life is stronger than metal and stone, more powerful than typhoons and volcanoes.
Liu Cixin
Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) has appeared in the general population at approximately the same time as Bee Colony Collapse.
Steven Magee
At the same time that a massive deployment of biologically harmful radio frequency (RF) radiation devices across the mass population has occurred, we see the reduction of health care for the poor, sick and elderly.
Steven Magee
There has never been a time in human history where so many people routinely carry recording and surveillance devices.
Steven Magee
We are not the stuff that abides, but patternsthat perpetuate themselves.
Norbert Wiener
School taught me how to do language, maths and science; it failed to teach me the very basics of how to keep my home healthy.
Steven Magee
As a science fiction writer who began as a fan, I do not use my fiction as a disguised way to criticize the reality of the present. I feel that the greatest appeal of science fiction is the creation of numerous imaginary worlds outside of reality. I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big bang. The three-billion-year history of life’s evolution from self-reproducing molecules to civilization contains twists and romances that cannot be matched by any myth or epic. There is also the poetic vision of space and time in relativity, the weird subatomic world of quantum mechanics … these wondrous stories of science all possess an irresistible attraction. Through the medium of science fiction, I seek only to create my own worlds using the power of imagination, and to make known the poetry of Nature in those worlds, to tell the romantic legends that have unfolded between Man and Universe.
Liu Cixin
You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet.
Elon Musk
I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I just try to think about the future and not be sad
Elon Musk
Personally I do not agree with sex being brought into science at all. The idea of 'women and science' is entirely irrelevant. Either a woman is a good scientist, or she is not; in any case she should be given opportunities, and her work should be studied from the scientific, not the sex, point of view
Hertha Ayrton
One can only wonder what the motivation is for Mauna Kea astronomers to subject their nighttime support staff to extremely long and fatiguing night shifts when they are easily avoidable.
Steven Magee
Extreme night shift work in high altitude astronomy is easily avoidable by using a split night shift where the first night shift starts before sunset and finishes at midnight and the second night shift starts with a new fresh person working through to after sunrise.
Steven Magee
Research suggests that sea level adapted humans that work at the very high altitude 13,796 feet summit of Mauna Kea may eventually develop sleep apnea and fatigue from the low oxygen environment.
Steven Magee
Even if ninety-nine percent of what you discover is later proven wrong, it is the one percent that is right that matters.
Steven Magee
Very high altitude extreme night shift work is a class 2A carcinogen that may result in lifelong disabling sleep disorders, high cholesterol, radiation sickness and heart, lung and brain damage.
Steven Magee
A mathematician believes that describing the speed of Mercury with equations amounts to science.
Bill Gaede
A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.
Bill Gaede
Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.
Neil Armstrong
Stephenson had large wrought-iron boiler plates available and he also had the courage of his calculations... The idea found its best-known expression in the Menai railway bridge opened in 1850. Stephenson's beams, which weighed 1,500 tons each, were built beside the Straits and were floated into position between the towers on rafts across a swirling tide. They were raised rather over a hundred feet up the towers by successive lifts with primitive hydraulic jacks. All this was not done without both apprehension and adventure; they were giants on the earth in those days.
J.E. Gordon
(T)he increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts.
Galileo Galilei
Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.
William Thomson
Since 1849 I have studied incessantly, under all its aspects, a question which was already in my mind since 1832. I confess that my scheme is still a mere dream, and I do not shut my eyes to the fact that so long as I alone believe it to be possible, it is virtually impossible. ... The scheme in question is the cutting of a canal through the Isthmus of Suez. This has been thought of from the earliest historical times, and for that very reason is looked upon as impracticable. Geographical dictionaries inform us indeed that the project would have been executed long ago but for insurmountable obstacles. [On his inspiration for the Suez Canal.]
Ferdinand de Lesseps
The steam engine has done much more for science than science has done for the steam engine.
William Thomson
There's no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don't think this is merely coincidental. It cries out for another explanation, an explanation that... points to purpose and intelligent design in the cosmos.
Guillermo González
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.
William Thomson
Science isn't just about blowing things up. Rather it's about blowing things up and knowing how you did it.
William Gurstelle
Life off Earth is in two important respects not at all unworldly: you can choose to focus on the surprises and pleasures, or the frustrations. And you can choose to appreciate the smallest scraps of experience, the everyday moments, or to value only the grandest, most stirring ones.
Chris Hadfield
I have been in my bed for five weeks, oppressed with weakness and other infirmities from which my age, seventy four years, permits me not to hope release. Added to this (proh dolor! [O misery!]) the sight of my right eye — that eye whose labors (dare I say it) have had such glorious results — is for ever lost. That of the left, which was and is imperfect, is rendered null by continual weeping.
Galileo Galilei
Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.
Galileo Galilei
Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.
Galileo Galilei
Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.
Galileo Galilei
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
Galileo Galilei
All men are equal before fish.
Herbert Hoover
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo Galilei
Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted fie thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time.
Liu Cixin
A newly formed planet appeared on the large screen. its surface was till red-hot, like a piece of charcoal fresh out of the furnace. Time passed at the rate of geological eras, and the planet gradually cooled. The color and patterns on the surface slowly shifted in a hypnotic manner. A few minutes later, an orange planet appeared on the screen, indicating the end of the simulation run."The computations were done at the coarsest level; to do it with more precision would require over a month." Green Glasses moved the mouse and zoomed in on the surface of the planet. The view swept over a broad desert, over a cluster of strangely shaped, towering mountain peaks, over a circular depression like an impact crater."What are we looking at?" Yang Dong asked."Earth. Without life, this is what the surface of the planet would look like now.""But . . . where are the oceans?""There are no oceans. No rivers either. The entire surface is dry.""Your'e saying that without life, liquid water would not exist on Earth?""The reality would probably be even more shocking. Remember, this is only a coarse simulation, but at least you can see how much of an impact life had in the present state of the Earth.""But--""Do you think life is nothing but a fragile, thin, soft shell clinging to the surface of this planet?""Isn't it?""Only if you neglect the power of time. If a colony of ants continue to move clods the size of grains of rice, they could remove all of Mount Tai in a billion years. As long as you give it enough time, life is stronger than metal and stone, more powerful than typhoons and volcanoes.
Liu Cixin