I decided to put up a list of quotes from alchemists/engineers/inventors/scientists who are all icons and fathers of the leaps that advanced our technical capabilities to where they are today. The point with these quotes is that is seems to me that intellectuals, including myself, seems to pass through 3 phases that come with age and accumulation of knowledge: idealism, scepticism, and wisdom. The first and last are open for imagination and boldness in the pursuit of the limits. The middle one, which is the dominant one today, prevails as "common sense" in most of us. The quotes below are from people who, in my opinion, has something to show for being labeled among "our world finest minds" - but aware that boundless minds and risking the impossible are required to reach for the sky.
“I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
“We build too many walls and not enough bridges.”
Isaac Newton, physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.”
“The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.”
Niels Bohr, physicist. Nobel Prize winner.
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist. Nobel Prize winner
“We haven't got the money, so we've got to think!”
“If your result needs a statistician then you should design a better experiment”
"The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine." (great minds don't see everything)
"For Christ's sake, Soddy, don't call it
transmutation. They'll have our heads off as alchemists."
Ernest Rutherford, the "father of nuclear physics", 1908 Nobel Prize winner
“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.”
“Doubt is the father of invention.”
Galileo Galilei, physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher
“The man of science is a poor philosopher.”
“Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.”
Arthur C. Clarke, inventor. Nobel Prize nominated.
“Breakthroughs are what define our species. They come about because we are threatened.”
“If you don't have a consensus that it's nonsense, you don't have a breakthrough.”
"Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.”
“We have a lot of openings for people...not just engineers, but people that can help us build research spaceships and production spaceships.”
“Our success proves without question that manned space flight does not require mammoth government expenditures...it can be done by a small company operating with limited resources and a few dozen dedicated employees.” (
so "alchemists" launched into space)
Burt Rutan, legendary aerospace engineer, and driving force in
Scaled Composities.
One of the main drives for this blog is a dream. A vivid one. One of those dreams that works as a wake up call. In short, I dreamt that doubters (established scientists and government) literally one day had to wake up one morning looking up into the sky and see creative engineers, who did not care "what is possible", blasting off towards their dream: space.
