Charles Babbage Quotes

Much of contemporary science is really the length and shadow of the technology we apply.

As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of the science. Whenever any result is sought by its aid, the question will then arise — by what course of calculation can these results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?

Blanket objection is not very reasonable to me - any effort to control scientific advances is doomed to fail.

Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now.

I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.

In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.

Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951.

There was the scientific and technical progress which couldn't be predicted by the state.

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.

America was probably Europe's equal scientifically by the end of World War I and certainly surpassed it after the chaos of World War II.

The ... progress of improvement and discovery ought not to be overlooked. ... Philosophy already directs her finger at sources of inexhaustible power. ... We are on the eve of mechanical discoveries still greater than any which have yet appeared.

So now, if we don't fund the physical sciences, where will the Next Big Thing come from?

In an era of ever-increasing globalization, what it takes to become and remain a science superpower has fundamentally changed.

The pace at which fundamental discoveries of basic science are being uncovered is accelerating, as is the speed at which medical practice is being transformed by these inventions.

Science plays a huge role in our lives. We're surrounded by technology, we depend on it.

There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.

Our scientists all the more occupy advanced positions in the development of world science. By the example of their successes in the field of atomic energy, our scientists and technicians have vividly shown how much the increased might of the Soviet state and the further growth of its international authority depends on their efforts and practical successes.

Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. It's time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and work to restore America's place as the world leader in science and technology.

Furnished as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence.

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none left over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment.

The whole of the developments and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery ... As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science.

Further, it would take one of those impossible coincidences that the Modern Liberal relies on so heavily to explain how it is that the two most religious nations in the Western World - the United States and Israel - are also arguably the world's two most scientifically and technologically advanced.

Today's science is tomorrow's technology.

Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument.