Frank Press Quotes
When the first computers started to come in, we tried to digitalize the seismological equipment.
Press, Frank. Interview by Shirley K. Cohen. California Institute of Technology Archives, 1983.
This is one of the great perceptions of what was to come in computing.
He was one of the team that created the first Atomic Bomb. In 1946, the atomic bomb was known about by almost all Americans and almost no one had even heard of a computer or the concept of a computer. The British and Americans during the war had collaborated to build very limited electronic calculating machines but the concept of programs to control the calculating machines was new—initially created by van Neumann and Englishman Alan Turing. When he made this statement most people thought it was the ravings of a “mad scientist. He was one of the team that later developed the first real computer at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.”
A quantum computer is a radically different kind of computer that uses the physics of Quantum Mechanics—the latest of the large systemic Physics breakthroughs for which there has as yet been very little technology or practical applications. In theory quantum computing will be much more powerful and orders of magnitude faster than existing supercomputers.
Frank Press was an American geophysicist. He was an advisor to four U.S. presidents, and later served two consecutive terms as president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1981–1993). He was the author of 160 scientific papers and co-author of the textbooks Earth and Understanding Earth.
