Paul Virilio Quotes

The speed of light sucks.

To get high data transfer rates in communicating information, you would love to use optical fibers. The problem is that light is extremely hard to manipulate. So we make a perfect copy of the information carried by the light. We transfer it to matter - the condensate.

We covered every major segment of this broadband communications world.

As a matter of fact, when compression technology came along, we thought the future in 1996 was about voice. We got it wrong. It is about voice, video, and data, and that is what we have today on these cell phones.

Time travel and teleportation will have to wait. It may take centuries to master these technology. But within the coming decades, we will understand dark matter, perhaps test string theory, find planets which can harbor life, and maybe have Brain 2.0, i.e. our consciousness on a disk which will survive even after we die.

The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

OK, so what's the speed of dark?

Photons have neither morals or visas.

Globalization is the speed of light.

Now, since the time of Newton there had been a debate about whether light was a wave - that is, a traveling disturbance in some background medium - or a particle, which travels regardless of the presence of a background medium. The observation of Maxwell that electromagnetic waves must exist and that their speed was identical to that of light ended the debate: light was an electromagnetic wave.

Scarcely anyone who comprehends this theory can escape its magic.

Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.

The electronic image is not fixed to any material base and, like our DNA, it has become a code that can circulate to any container that will hold it, defying death as it travels at the speed of light.

There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.

On quantum theory I use up more brain grease (rough translation of German idiom) than on relativity.

When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer.

The Theory of Relativity confers an absolute meaning on a magnitude which in classical theory has only a relative significance: the velocity of light. The velocity of light is to the Theory of Relativity as the elementary quantum of action is to the Quantum Theory: it is its absolute core.

Quantum entanglement allows you to send information faster than light, which upset Einstein. But Einstein has the last laugh. The information you send on quantum entanglement is random, useless information. So Einsein still has the last laugh.

Picturesqueness is a lost art. We may expect at anytime to hear that a collar ad is blazing its electric lights atop of the largest pyramid.

Wearable devices are here to stay, and they'll only get more sophisticated and effective as they evolve. Until now, most of us have made our health and fitness decisions based on what we think we know about ourselves. Advancements in technology - wearables and otherwise - will eventually take much of the guess work out of healthy living.

The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

I like the iPhone, the iPad, all the various members of that family. But I like all the various technologies that are becoming available to make the world more accessible to people who are blind and with low vision.

I dream of a Digital India where high-speed Digital Highways unite the Nation.

While lawyers are arguing about the PATRIOT Act or the America Freedom Act, the point is, the terrorists have moved on, the technologists have moved on, and we, the United States of America, are not taking advantage of the latest and greatest in technology the terrorists are. We need to get smart about it.

The scale of light can be described by numbers called the frequency and as the numbers get higher, the light goes from red to blue to ultraviolet. We can't see ultraviolet light, but it can affect photographic plates. It's still light only the number is different.