Michael Dickinson Quotes

When you see a fly flitting around your hair or your potato salad, you might see an annoyance. But in my lab, you really see a marvelous machine: arguably the most sophisticated flying device on the planet.

The 'snakebot', which is a type of mechanized, biologically inspired robot, itself has roots in Japanese laboratories of the 1970s. What the team at Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon is doing today under professor Howie Choset is making the 'snakebots' stronger, smaller, and more maneuverable than ever.

A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements, but not with a corresponding degree of strength, though it is deficient only in the power of maintaining equilibrium. We may therefore say that such an instrument constructed by man is lacking in nothing except the life of the bird, and this life must needs be supplied from that of man.

I have discovered that a screw-shaped device such as this, if it is well made from starched linen, will rise in the air if turned quickly.

It is difficult to fly without wings.

I thought jet planes were just trucks with more wings and less wheels.

We returned home, after these experiments, with the conviction that sailing flight was not the exclusive prerogative of birds.

The natural function of the wing is to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of gods. More than any other thing that pertains to the body it partakes of the nature of the divine.

To me it's still a greater miracle when a fly flies than when a human being undertakes to do so.

They [Erasers] were bad fliers," Angel chimed in, "And in their minds, they weren't all kill the mutants, like they usually are. They were like, remember to flap!

Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.

People can fly. Some people fly higher than others, that's all.

Sir, Your letter of the 15th is received, but Age has long since obliged me to withhold my mind from Speculations of the difficulty of those of your letter, that their are means of artificial buoyancy by which man may be supported in the Air, the Balloon has proved, and that means of directing it may be discovered is against no law of Nature and is therefore possible as in the case of Birds, but to do this by mechanical means alone in a medium so rare and unassisting as air must have the aid of some principal not yet generally known.

A bird maintains itself in the air by imperceptible balancing, when near to the mountains or lofty ocean crags; it does this by means of the curves of the winds which as they strike against these projections, being forced to preserve their first impetus bend their straight course towards the sky with divers revolutions, at the beginning of which the birds come to a stop with their wings open, receiving underneath themselves the continual buffetings of the reflex courses of the winds.

There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.

I was interested in flying beginning at age 7, when a close family friend took me in his little airplane. And I remember looking at the wheel of the airplane as we rolled down the runway, because I wanted to remember the exact moment that I first went flying... the other thing growing up is that I was always interested in science.

Take a picture of this so Isaac can see it when they invent robot eyes.

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

Technology is lust removed from nature.

My company mascot is the bumblebee. Because of its tiny wings and heavy body, aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly. But the bumblebee doesn't know that, so it flies anyways.

Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.

The function of the wing is to take what is heavy and raise it up in the region above.

Scientists who have dedicated their lives to building machines that think, feel that it's only a matter of time before some form of consciousness is captured in the laboratory.

I showed it is possible to fly a little bit like a bird.

You can study gravity forever without learning how to fly.