Ian Anderson Quotes

Growing up, I was fascinated with Buck Rogers' airplanes. As I began to mature in World War II, it became jets and rocket planes. But it was always in the air.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic - being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

Registration is a World War II response, and we need a 1980 solution.

World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.

I think that I got committed to physics at the age of - oh, it must have been 1942 - ten, when most countries were at war and children were interested in airplanes and bombs and such things.

People often refer to bygone days as a simpler time. Perhaps, more accurately, my grandparents' generation focused better on what mattered. Traffic jams and minor quibbles with my husband Daniel pale in comparison with the worries that were faced on the home front and battlefield during the Second World War.

Men actually flew 1000 years ago…. An important thing about Eilmer's and Ibn Firnas's inventions of the glider is that both occurred in intellectual environments that fostered invention. Ibn Firnas lived during the Golden Age of Islamic art and science, and Eilmer belonged to the Benedictine order, which saw God Himself as a master craftsman.

Can you imagine being Leonardo Da Vinci in the 1400s trying to describe his ideas for machines that would allow humans to fly to the average person of his time? This is hundreds of years before the invention of electricity, the internal combustion engine, and many other things we take for granted today.

Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.

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

Given all that history has shown us of the consequences of technology - from the atlatl spear to the A-bomb - why have so few groups of human beings managed to resist the incursions of technology? Or be choosy about the extent to which they'll employ a technological innovation?

The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.

Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.

Engineering is a great profession. There is the satisfaction of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings homes to men or women. Then it elevates the standard of living and adds to the comforts of life. This is the engineer's high privilege.

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.

In the old days when people invented a new function they had something useful in mind. Now, they invent them deliberately just to invalidate our ancestors' reasoning, and that is all they are ever going to get out of them.

Everything - design and technology and materials - has changed since the World Trade Center was built. A lot of it has to do with computers, which allow us to be far more efficient as well as structurally sound.

The biggest engineering companies, like Schlumberger, Halliburton and others, have technology they spent billions of dollars developing.

An automobile has about 10,000 moving parts, right? An airplane has two million, and it has to stay up in the air.

The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed.

One ought to be ashamed to make use of the wonders of science embodied in a radio set, the while appreciating them as little as a cow appreciates the botanic marvels in the plants she munches.

Let me tell you, my friend, that there are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very man who discovered electricity, who would themselves not so long before been burned as wizards

My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home.

The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the Use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and Printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans.