Patrick Ness Quotes
The ability to make fire at will. It allowed us light to see in the darkness, warmth against the cold, a tool to cook our food.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of the Delta’s engines. ‘Fire is what eventually led to travel across the black beyond, the ability to start a new life on a New World.
Ness, Patrick. The New World. Candlewick Press, 2013.
His view was that the major driver of globalization is communications and information which travel at light speed.
Many of his greatest ideas were not sufficiently appreciated by many other scientists nor the businessmen who funded scientific projects then. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.
Cayley developed the first gliders and envisioned air travel at the same time that Thomas Jefferson was President.
Ataturk quickly envisioned the importance of the airplane. He even sent is daughter to Russia to learn to fly a plane, and she became the first Turkish Military Officer to do so. This was typical of Ataturk—killing two or more reform “birds” with one stone. He not only brought the airplane into the Turkish consciousness by having his daughter fly which attracted great attention of the press and got people talking, but showed that women were capable of the most complex technological tasks. Before Ataturk, few women in Turkey ever did anything but parenting and homemaking. Ataturk gave Turkish women the vote before America adopted women’s suffrage.
Patrick Ness is a British-American author, journalist, lecturer, and screenwriter. Born in the United States, Ness moved to London and holds dual citizenship. He is best known for his books for young adults, including the Chaos Walking trilogy and A Monster Calls.
