Richard Hamming Quotes

The first time you do something, it's science. The second time, it's engineering. The third time, it's just being a technician. I'm a scientist. Once I do something, I want to do something else.

Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off... All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.

All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.

To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.

You never know with these things when you're trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental.

If you don't know what makes green, you're going to try every color combination.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.

Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

With innovation, there is always risk.

The only thing that was in my mind when we made that first phone call was, 'Is it going to work?' We had all these parts hand soldered together, engineers standing by with the soldering iron - just in case.

I think the philosophy will continue to be what it always was; which was, let's keep throwing a bunch of things at the wall, and see what sticks.

You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.

There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.

A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build.

Research is a way of taking calculated risks to bring about incalculable consequences.

There is no knowledge without risk taking.

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness.

I'm sort of an experimenter; I thought it'd be interesting to play around and see what's there.

Kids should be allowed to break stuff more often. That's a consequence of exploration. Exploration is what you do when you don't know what you're doing. That's what scientists do every day.

In a lot of formats, you can be really experimental and see what would happen.

I feel like every time I take on a movie, it's important that the possibility of failure exists, and of the unknown, because it's a challenge to do something I haven't done before and something I have to try to work out.

As a child, I wanted to know how things worked and to control them. With a friend, I built a number of complicated models that I could control.

Sure, science involves trial and error. Scientists refine theories each day. But as they do, they help us grasp more clearly the wonders of the world and the universe.

I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.