Eric Betzig Quotes

Natural gas is better distributed than any other fuel in the United States. It's down every street and up every alley. There's a pipeline.

Bowling is all physics and energy distribution. It's F = ma. So it is actually one of the most science-y sports, because it literally is just a ball and a surface and objects to knock down.

I've got a lot of artistic energy, but there's only so much of it, though. You don't want to spread yourself thin.

Limit or eliminate late-night computer and television viewing. A computer or TV screen may seem much dimmer than a light bulb, but these screens often fill your field of vision, mimicking the effects of a room filled with light.

Scientists have continued to tinker with different elements and have learned new ways to store and deliver energy.

Equity and energy can grow concurrently only to a point. Below a threshold of per capita wattage, motors improve the conditions for social progress. Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity.

Fossil fuels are - they're inherently centralized. And you need a lot of infrastructure to get them out, and you need a lot of infrastructure to transport it, as Obama was explaining in front of all that pipe, right? Whereas renewable energy is everywhere.

I wake up as soon as it gets light.

I'm not a vindictive person. But I do want to shine a light on human frailty and heroism in equal measure.

The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn't always where you want to use it, and it isn't always when you want to use it.

For a tree, to endure four months of daylight is like you or I going without sleep for four months.

Monsters aren't as scary if you start shining lights on them.

If we just isolate distributed solar all by itself, it does not work without the utility around it. And so the utility needs to be paid for the services it provides.

I prefer complete darkness while sleeping at my house. If I'm staying in a hotel, I keep the lights on.

I am a very bad sleeper. There are lots of times when I'm trying to fall asleep at someone's place, and if they don't have blackout curtains, I am waking up with any amount of sunlight.

NED is talking about through-putting this energy out to the vicinity of Boston then taking a northern route up to Nova Scotia and then exporting it, so they're not talking about giving us any local benefits at all.

Light helps the body predict the future: it's a sign of how our environment will change in the coming hours and days, and our bodies prepare themselves accordingly.

Energy consumption has to be managed by an intelligent grid when it comes to highly populated areas. Smart-grid technologies allow for the integration of renewable energy into the grid as well as energy from distributed sources.

Light is a profound degrader of our sleep.

I've learned how to sleep on airplanes. When I'm taking a trans-Atlantic flight or going to a different continent, I will always read because reading puts me to sleep. When you watch a movie, you have all that light coming to your eyes, but with reading, I can't get through 15 or 20 pages.

I've been studying how quickly we can get energy out to the poor countries - a lot of which are in Africa - and how little progress we've made there. There's no more electricity today in sub-Saharan Africa per person than there was 20 years ago.

Half of the energy is used by one seventh of the world's population.

Why would we build as unequal a renewable energy sector as we have built a fossil fuel sector? The nice thing about renewables is they're everywhere, so you don't have to have monopoly control in the same way.

I think the best way is to keep stressing, that, as we build out a new energy system, one of the best things about it, if we do it right, will be that it will be more local, more democratic, more distributed, and, in the long run, much more economically sensible.

If you're looking at distributing alternative energy in Nigeria, for instance, what gets in your way is not people's ability to pay, not people's desire for a clean solar lamps or biomass opportunities. But there is a strong status quo that really depends on selling diesel.