Donna Strickland Quotes

What the ultrafast laser does is that because it doesn't have to just cut from the surface, it's only at the intense focal point that it does this damage where the electrons come off the atoms, you could actually put your laser and scan it over your cornea and it would cut underneath that.

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

When I started on my research, I never expected I could invent the LED and laser diode.

It was strange, in a way, because there were no ideas involved in the laser that weren't already known by somebody 25 years before lasers were discovered. The ideas were all there; just, nobody put it together.

You cannot make an aircraft without forged components.

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.

The real technical problems came because people working on the project didn't really follow my proposal at all, but set out to do other things instead of making a laser.

We should note that this latter type of shift was successfully amplified to a considerable extent by Russian physicists using the intense light of a ruby laser whose wavelength is close to that of a transition of the potassium atom.

There is the most wonderful thing called Polaris: it's a very high frequency laser treatment that lifts and tightens the skin.

Shine like the day I set cosmic eyes on you, friend, by the light of the sweet squash in my lovely laser broom.

NASA has spin-offs, and it's a huge and very impressive list, including accurate and affordable LASIK eye surgery.

Basically, any material you can squeeze, melt or generate into a powder, you can print.

My father works for Xerox and fixes those gigantic copy machines that are about 10 feet wide.

We can also cut by heat - heat punch. And we also can cut by cold - extreme cold. When you cut with heat, it makes a mark. With cold, no mark. It depends on the fabric.

I'm a big laser believer - I really think they are the wave of the future.

I was quite unable to make any white metal alloy hard enough to be made into powder by my machinery.

But certainly the laser proved to be what I realized it was going to be. At that moment in my life I was too ignorant in business law to be able to do it right, and if I did it over again probably the same damn thing would happen.

After a few years of intensive research, we found a way to use a pulsed laser directed into a nozzle to vaporize any material, allowing for the first time the atoms of any element in the periodic table to be produced cold in a supersonic beam.

My great-grandfather Melvin had been a carpenter - so was my father - and they taught me the value of tools: saws, hammers, chisels, files and rulers. It all dealt with conciseness and precision. It eliminated guesswork. One has to know his tools, so he doesn't work against himself.

Over the past 50 years we got versions of X-ray specs and space vacations, and even death rays. But the X-ray specs don't fit on your face - they're big things that screen your luggage for guns. Space vacations are real, but they cost $20 million. We have death rays, but you have to be a triple Ph.D. to play with them.

Nearly all inventions are not recognised for their positive side either when they're made. So, for example, scientists didn't go out to design a CD machine: they designed a laser. But we got all sorts of things from a laser which we never remotely imagined, and we're still finding things for a laser to do.

One of the most practical utensils I can't live without is my 'Joyce Chen' Scissors. They cut with precision.

There is enough material in the Kuiper Belt to build anything out there. We could gobble up all the little asteroids, filtering out all the volatile materials, leaving us with bits of rock and using that to make some incredible structures.

When you make and drape clothing, the scissors are your tool. What can I say about them? They're my babies. And you have to take care of them correctly. You have to have them sharpened, and you can't use them for any other material.

Unless we understand a certain material - metal or resin and plastic - understanding the processes that turn it from ore, for example - we can never develop and define form that's appropriate.