Quotes about electronics (240 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The electron: may it never be of any use to anybody!”

J. J. Thomson (1856–1940) British physicist

A popular toast or slogan at J. J. Thomson's Cavendish Laboratory in the first years of the 1900s, as quoted in Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Volume 35 (1951), p. 251.
Attributed

“Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone.”

Dan Brown book Angels & Demons

Source: Angels & Demons

Feeling

“When a photon comes down, it interacts with electrons throughout the glass, not just on the surface. The photon and electrons do some kind of dance, the net result of which is the same as if the photon hit only on the surface.”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

Source: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), p. 17

Dance

“The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 99

Age , World , Music

“In fact, there is something puzzling about the Higgs mass we now do observe. It is generally known as the “hierarchy problem.” Since it is the Higgs mass that sets the scale for the masses of all other known elementary particles, one might guess that it should be similar to another mass that plays a fundamental role in physics, the so-called Planck mass, which is the fundamental unit of mass in the theory of gravitation. (It is the mass of hypothetical particles whose gravitational attraction for one another would be as strong as the electric force between two electrons separated by the same distance.) But the Planck mass is about a hundred thousand trillion times larger than the Higgs mass. So, although the Higgs particle is so heavy that a giant particle collider was needed to create it, we still have to ask, why is the Higgs mass so small?”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

"The Big Higgs Question" http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/07/09/big-higgs-question/, The New York Review of Books, 9 July 2012

Problem , Strong , Time

“The assumption of the contraction of the electron in Lorentz's theory must be introduced at an earlier stage than Lorentz has actually done.”

Hermann Minkowski The Fundamental Equations for Electromagnetic Processes in Moving Bodies

The Fundamental Equations for Electromagnetic Processes in Moving Bodies (1907)

“It's not the union between my head and the electronic eye what makes me feel 'cyborg', it's the union between the software and my brain.”

Neil Harbisson (1984) Catalan-Irish musician, artist and activist

As quoted in Ara (19 January 2011). "No som blancs ni negres, tots som taronges" http://www.ara.cat/ara_premium/ara_tu/No-blancs-negres-tots-taronges_0_411558847.html

Feeling

“The rigid electron is in my view a monster in relation to Maxwell's equations, whose innermost harmony is the principle of relativity.”

Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) German mathematician and physicist

as quoted by Dennis Overbye, Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance (2001)

“The light microscope opened the first gate to microcosm. The electron microscope opened the second gate to microcosm. What will we find opening the third gate?”

Ernst Ruska (1906–1988) German physicist

Das Lichtmikroskop öffnete das erste Tor zum Mikrokosmos. Das Elektronenmikroskop öffnete das zweite Tor zum Mikrokosmos. Was werden wir finden wenn wir das dritte Tor öffnen?
as quoted by Nan Yao, director of the Imaging and Analysis Center at the Princeton Materials Institute, in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, February 26, 2001, Vol. 90, No. 18 http://www.princeton.edu/~iac/pwb2_26b.html.

Light

“Can a physicist visualize an electron? The electron is materially inconceivable and yet, it is so perfectly known through its effects that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airlines through the night skies and take the most accurate measurements. What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electrons as real while refusing to accept the reality of a Designer on the ground that they cannot conceive Him?”

Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) German, later an American, aerospace engineer and space architect

In letter to California State board of Education (14 September 1972)

Reality , Night

“At a very early stage I realised that it's a real problem to perform electronic music on stage because electronic instruments are not particularly convincing on a visual point of view: somebody behind his computer, it's not particularly visual. So I was inspired by the opera. And what was the opera in the 19th century? It was the idea for a musician to join and to work, to collaborate with a stage director, with carpenters, painters, people doing decors, graphic artists to have a visual prolongation, a visual correspondence to their work. That's what I tried to do with the tools of my generation: electronics and video and lights and all that.”

Jean-Michel Jarre (1948) French composer, performer and music producer

interviewed on the Danish Monitor radio programme 2005-11-30

People , Music , Idea , Problem

“Amid all the triumphs of our civilization — yes, and amid the crushing problems of overpopulation too — it is sad to reflect how many millions of people suffer from increasing loneliness and isolation. Our serving-man will be a boon to them; he will always answer, and the most vapid conversation cannot bore him.
For the future, we plan more models, male and female — some of them without the limitations of this first one, I promise you! — of more advanced design, true bio-electronic beings.
Not only will they possess their own computer, capable of individual programming; they will be linked to the World Data Network. Thus everyone will be able to enjoy the equivalent of an Einstein in their own homes. Personal isolation will then be banished forever!”

Brian W. Aldiss book Super-Toys Last All Summer Long

Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (1969)

People , World , Sadness , Home

“For me the future of the image is going to be in electronic form. … You will see perfectly beautiful images on an electronic screen. And I'd say that would be very handsome. They would be almost as close as the best reproductions.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

Interview with Paul Hill (March 1975), published in P. Hill & T.J. Cooper (1979), Dialogue with Photography

Beauty , Future

“It is the historical necessity, if there is a historical necessity in history, that a new decade of electronic television should follow to the past decade of electronic music.”

Nam June Paik (1932–2006) American video art pioneer

Nam June Paik (1965), as cited in: David Dunn, " A History of Electronic Music Pioneers http://vasulka.org/Kitchen/PDF_Eigenwelt/pdf/021-062.pdf." ders.(Hrsg.), Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt.(Katalog), Linz (1992): 21-62.
1960s

Music , History , Past

“Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. I noticed that young people — they're very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone. But I am a big believer in technology and I'm a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates new ideas. It encourages creativity. And so I've always been a strong supporter of open Internet use. I'm a big supporter of non-censorship.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Interview in Shanghai, as quoted in [http://learning.sohu.com/20091118/n268291186.shtml China Daily (17 November 2009)
2009, Town Hall meeting in Shanghai (November 2009)

People , World , Idea , Business

“Symmetry is not enough by itself. In electromagnetism, for example, if you write down all the symmetries we know, such as Lorentz invariance and gauge invariance, you don’t get a unique theory that predicts the magnetic moment of the electron. The only way to do that is to add the principle of renormalisability – which dictates a high degree of simplicity in the theory and excludes these additional terms that would have changed the magnetic moment of the electron from the value Schwinger calculated in 1948.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

as quoted in an interview by Matthew Chalmers: [Model physicist, CERN Courier, 13 October 2017, http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/70138]

Way , Gauge , Change

“I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them.”

Ansel Adams book The Negative

The Negative (1981), introduction to second edition

“One possibility in this direction is to regard, classically, an electron as the end of a single Faraday line of force. The electric field in this picture from discrete Faraday lines of force, which are to be treated as physical things, like strings. One has then to develop a dynamics for such a string like structure, and quantize it…. In such a theory a bare electron would be inconceivable, since one cannot imagine the end of a piece of string without having the string.”

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) theoretical physicist

Bombay Lectures (1955)

Imagination

“H. A. Lorentz has found out the Relativity theorem and has created the Relativity postulate as a hypothesis that electrons and matter suffer contractions in consequence of their motion according to a certain law. A. Einstein has brought out the point very clearly, that this postulate is not an artificial hypothesis but is rather a new way of comprehending the time-concept, which is forced upon us by observation of natural phenomena.”

Hermann Minkowski The Fundamental Equations for Electromagnetic Processes in Moving Bodies

The Fundamental Equations for Electromagnetic Processes in Moving Bodies (1907)

Law , Way , Nature , Suffering

“On electronic music: "The source is electronic, but what you do with it is the same as with acoustic instruments. Sound is sound and vibration is vibration, whether from an electronic source or an acoustic instrument.”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

The way we use these sources is the key in order to define the required musical result. Without neglecting the acoustic conventional instruments, I spend a fair amount of time dealing with the electronic sources of sound. But please do not think computers! Computers are extremely helpful and amazing for a multitude of scientific areas, but for me, when it comes to creation, they are insufficient and slow. Therefore all of my efforts are to stay away from that beast".
2012

“Heisenberg’s starting point was the philosophical judgment, that a physical theory should not concern itself with things like electron orbits in atoms that can never be observed. This is a risky assumption, but in this case it served Heisenberg well.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

Source: Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, 2nd ed. 2015), Ch. 1: Historical Introduction

“In this derivation Bohr had relied on the old idea of classical radiation theory, that the frequencies of spectral lines should agree with the frequency of the electron’s orbital motion, but he had assumed this only for the largest orbits, with large n. The light frequencies he calculated for transitions between lower states, such as n=2 → n=1, did not at all agree with the orbital frequency of the initial or final state. So Bohr’s work represented another large step away from classical physics.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

Source: Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, 2nd ed. 2015), Ch. 1: Historical Introduction

Light , Idea

“But when there’s a vacuum in our democracy, when we don’t vote, when we take our basic rights and freedoms for granted, when we turn away and stop paying attention and stop engaging and stop believing and look for the newest diversion, the electronic versions of bread and circuses, then other voices fill the void. A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment takes hold. And demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems. They promise to fight for the little guy even as they cater to the wealthiest and the most powerful. They promise to clean up corruption and then plunder away. They start undermining norms that ensure accountability, try to change the rules to entrench their power further. And they appeal to racial nationalism that’s barely veiled, if veiled at all.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2018, Speech at the University of Illinoise Speech (2018)

Democracy , Freedom , Problem , Fight

“I am absolutely prepared to talk about the spiritual life of an electronic computer: to state that it is reflecting or is in a bad mood… The question whether the machine really feels or ponders, or whether it merely looks as though it did, is of course absolutely meaningingless.”

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

As quoted in a letter written from J. Kalckar to John A. Wheeler dated June 10, 1977, which appears in Wheeler's "Law Without Law," pg 207.

Question , Bad luck , Life , Feeling

“Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

The Taming of the Screw (1983)

Drink

“Once he'd even reprogrammed the electronic billboards in Time Square to read: ALL DA LADIES LUV LEO… accidentally, of course.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

Time , Reading

“Yes, Jenna, I love you with all my heart. And with my atoms and molecules and electrons and whatever further breakdown you require.”

Sharon Shinn (1957) American science fiction writer

Source: Jenna Starborn

Love , Heart

“To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you've only pressed Pause.”

Anne Fadiman (1953) American essayist, journalist and magazine editor

Source: Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Books

“Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

Personality

“I bet," said Mulch, "that you would set the world on fire just to watch it burn."
Opal tapped the suggestion into a small electronic notepad on her pocket computer.
Thanks for that. Now, tell me everything.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Time Paradox

World

“When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“As for the age of electronics, Selena, I really don't want to get personal with something that comes with a warning label and batteries. (Grace)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Fantasy Lover

Source: Fantasy Lover

Age , Personality

“Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us. Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone.”

Dan Brown book Angels & Demons

Source: Angels & Demons

Feeling

“The poetry I love is written with someone’s voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone’s voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

Sleigh, Tom. "Robert Pinsky", ‘’BOMB Magazine’’ Summer, 1998. .
Other

Love , Sense , Reading

“At some point along the way, people had introduced me to bands like Depeche Mode and stuff that was on the softer side of electronic music and that completely intrigued me because of the sonic capabilities and possibilities. I got intrigued with that and then somewhere along the way somebody handed me a Skinny Puppy record and I think that changed my musical life.”

Klayton (1970) American musician

"Klayton Scott - Celldweller," (2003)

Life , People , Music , Way

“The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate state. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into self-delusion. We convince ourselves that global warming does not exist. Or we concede that it exists but insist that we can adapt. Both responses satisfy our mania for eternal optimism and our reckless pursuit of personal comfort. In America, when reality is distasteful we ignore it. But reality will soon descend like the Furies to shatter our complacency and finally our lives. We, as a species, may be doomed. And this is a bitter, bitter fact for a father to digest.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

Truthdig, Life Is Sacred, Sep 3, 2012 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/life_is_sacred_20120903/

Optimism , Reality , Personality

“These computing machines had already been designed, and some built, by {[w|Vannevar Bush}}, Norbert Wiener, and others, and were almost ready-made for the job. These scientists, as well as others such as von Neumann, Shannon and Bigelow, were in a position to see that machines of an electronic kind were ideally suited to carry out the whole of the operations of range-finding and location without any human intervention whatever.
These electronic computing machines were already developed to a very high degree of efficiency for the solution of mathematical equations, and some technical difficulties had led to the suggestion that a process of scanning, similar to that used in television, might be incorporated into the computer. Another innovation was the use of binary notation rather than decimal notation as in the early Harvard Mark I computer.”

Frank Honywill George (1921–1997) British psychologist

Source: The Brain As A Computer (1962), p.18

Mathematics

“Online dating versus traditional dating is like using an electronic calculator versus an abacus. They both can give you accurate results if used properly, but one of them is obviously faster and easier in the modern age.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

Age

“Einstein's theory was that everything about the laws of the universe and nature was relative. What you observe about something depends greatly upon your frame of reference at the time. That's why I can stand here in this concord cabin and drop my pen in comfort. In here I'm not traveling 1,400mph, am I? Everything works like that. Conditioned by its frame of reference. All the electronics in all the instruments in this cockpit obey the exact same laws they would if the plane were standing still. Because in this frame, like me they are not traveling at Mach two. And all the laws of nature behave the same way. This beam of light is going out in all directions at 186,000 miles per second. Being on the concord makes no difference to it's speed going forward, backwards sideways.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

The Day the Universe Changed (1985)

Law , Way , Travel , Nature

“I started doing electronics when I was a little kid, in the 5th or 6th grade, buying computer parts at a swap meet and writing my first programs. Simple things just blew my mind with respect to the sort of infinite simulation or combinatorial possibility inside the computer. My personal obsession from my childhood was that I just wanted to recreate reality inside the computer and then go in there.”

Philip Rosedale (1968) American businessman, founder of Second Life

Source: Peter Diamandis. " Second Life: How a Virtual World Became a Reality http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-diamandis/second-life-how-a-virtual_b_2831270.html," at huffingtonpost.com, 03/07/2013.

Reality , Parting , Childhood , Personality

“In our Post era, a new phenomenon has emerged expressing this new associative will of the species: I mean the super-networks of communication [Internet]. On this I conceive two images, one enthusiast and another disappointed: I see Gea as a body (the Biosphere) and as a mind or spirit (the Exosphere); the human creatures would be the neurons and the electronic networks the dendrites. Okay, an autistic geopsychology, full of traumas, and other psych pathologies. But let's not say that we already lack the means to understand each other.”

Jorge Majfud (1969) Uruguayan-American writer

Critica de la pasión pura (1998)

Disappointment , Communication , Understanding

“We made a completely new kind of transistor (the NPN BJT, and in our development work, our researcher, Leo Esaki, demonstrated the electron tunneling effect, which led to the development of the tunnel diode for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize seventeen years later, after he had joined IBM.”

Akio Morita (1921–1999) Japanese businessman

Source: Made in Japan (1986), p. 162.

“Till 2007 I have responded to everyone to all questions asked. You can read it in print media, electronic media. Yes, in 2007 when UPA again tried to take all legal routes to drag me to court then I stopped talking as I didn't want it to influence the issue because of Supreme Court ruling. Has any [other] CM been grilled for 9 hours? SC has seen the tape as it ordered the questioning. I have been through all those hurdles and I am ready for it. Modi won't surrender to such false political intentions.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2014, "GhoshanaPatra with Narendra Modi", 2014

Question , Reading , Falseness

“In electronic publishing, they're are no editors and if their are there not very good.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

"Five Columns", in The Keillor Reader (2014), p. 257

“With new technologies of surveillance, economies of scale overcome problems of cost. Since all their electronic communications can be accessed, it is no longer necessary to segregate the inmates from one another. As there is no outside world, escape becomes unimaginable. Technological progress has brought into being a system of surveillance more far-reaching than any Bentham could have conceived. Enclosing the entire population in a virtual Panopticon might seem the ultimate invasion of freedom. But universal confinement need not be experienced as a privation. If they know nothing else, most are likely to accept it as normal. If the technology through which surveillance operates also provides continuous entertainment, they may soon find any other way of living intolerable.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

In the Puppet Theatre: A Universal Panopticon (p. 125)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

World , Way , Communication , Problem

“Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

Age

“Mathematical programming assisted by electronic computers becomes the fundamental instrument of long-term economic planning, as well as of solving dynamic economic problems of a more limited scope. Here, the electronic computer does not replace the market. It fulfils a function which the market never was able to perform.”

Oskar R. Lange (1904–1965) Polish economist

"The computer and the market" (1967)

Mathematics , Problem

“President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale.”

Alberto Gonzales (1955) 80th United States Attorney General

2006-02-06 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/06/AR2006020600931.html.

“Armon Jarles, there is only the cosmos and the electronic entities that constitute it, without soul or purpose, save so far as neuronic minds impose purpose upon it.
“Armon Jarles, the Hierarchy embodies the highest form of such purpose.
“Armon Jarles, the supernatural and the idealized have one trait in common. They are not. There is only reality.”

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 10 (p. 105)

Soul , Reality

“Physics seems to have done reasonably well in studying electrons, although there is not to this day a precise definition of this term.”

Stephen Kosslyn (1948) American psychologist

Source: Image and Mind. 1980, p. 470

Study

“As I have often said, electrons and gerbils don't cheat. People do.”

Martin Gardner (1914–2010) recreational mathematician and philosopher

"Science: Why I Am Not A Paranormalist", in The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (1983)

People , Cheating

“A national programme which would provide television to about 80% of India’s population during the next ten years would be of great significance to national integration, for implementing schemes of economic and social development and for the stimulation and promotion of electronic industry. It is of particular significance for population living in isolated rural countries”

Vikram Sarabhai (1919–1971) (1919-1971), Indian physicist

His priority in 1974 quoted in "Communication and National Development".

Country

“According to the science of cybernetics, which deals with the topic of control in every kind of system (mechanical, electronic, biological, human, economic, and so on), there is a natural law that governs the capacity of a control system to work. It says that the control must be capable of generating as much "variety" as the situation to be controlled.”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 2, Chance, Risk and Malice, p. 37.

Law , Nature , Science

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978)

People , Motivation , Reality , Universe

“The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

Way , Knowledge , Thinking

“Imaginary numbers are not imaginary and the theory of complex numbers is no more complex than the theory of real numbers. Complex numbers are as intuitive for an electronics engineer as -100 is for the average person with an overdrawn bank account.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 3, “Words Scientists Don’t Use: At Least Not the Way You Do” (p. 56)

Personality

“To understand this radiation [ cosmic microwave background ], it is easier to begin thinking about the radiation from a very hot gas like that inside a neon light. The same neon… is, at room temperature, utterly transparent… The character of matter in general changes abruptly when it gets heated above 3,000 degrees or so. Below this temperature, matter is electrically neutral… At high temperatures in a neon light, the electrically charged pieces of atoms become unstuck. Frequent and violent collisions break down neutral atoms into electrons and unbalanced nuclei. Matter in this state is called plasma, and it radiates much of its collision energy in the form of light. …a gas of neutral atoms (like air) is virtually transparent. The free [charged] nuclei and electrons of plasma, by contrast, couple to light's electromagnetic fields and absorb it very efficiently. …You …see light only from the borderline layer of neon between opaque plasma and transparent neutral atoms.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Understanding , Thinking , Light , Change

“We are using electronic instruments both in the studio and on stage but we are not living in an ivory tower, banned from any kind of popularity doing just intellectual research on electronics. So we really like to entertain people in the best way possible to show how modern, sophisticated equipment can be used today in order to create a futuristic sound.”

Edgar Froese (1944–2015) German musician and founder of Tangerine Dream

People , Way

“Everybody sat around thinking about Panasonic, the Japanese electronics account. Finally I decided, what the hell, I'll throw a line to loosen them up. "The headline is, the headline is: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor."”

Jerry Della Femina (1936) American advertising executive

From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor (1970), Introduction

Hell , Thinking

“… the principle of the limiting character of the velocity of light. This statement… is not an arbitrary assumption but a physical law based on experience. In making this statement, physics does not commit the fallacy of regarding absence of knowledge as evidence for knowledge to the contrary. It is not absence of knowledge of faster signals, but positive experience which has taught us that the velocity of light cannot be exceeded. For all physical processes the velocity of light has the property of an infinite velocity. In order to accelerate a body to the velocity of light, an infinite amount of energy would be required, and it is therefore physically impossible for any object to obtain this speed. This result was confirmed by measurements performed on electrons. The kinetic energy of a mass point grows more rapidly than the square of its velocity, and would become infinite for the speed of light.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Law , Knowledge , Light , Speed

“When Doob came to his senses, he was aware that a large number of telephones were singing their little electronic songs.
Including his.
The birth cry of a new age.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"The Age of the One Moon"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

Age , Birth , Sense , Singing

“(on a line in the movie 2012) " 'The neutrinos have mutated.' Now, for the non-nerds here: neutrinos are tiny, sub-atomic, really really almost massless particles, they're released in nuclear breakdowns, like in the sun, for example. Five hundred trillion of them pass through your bodies every second. They can't mutate. Their structure is fundamental to the structure of the universe. Right? They can't just change. He might as well have gone, 'The electrons are angry'."”

Dara Ó Briain (1972) Irish comedian and television presenter

Dara Ó Briain: This is the Show (2010)

Universe , Change , Sun

“An eye from another world; a smell-detector, investigating the path ahead. We don't often see a snail that way, and that's because we've only recently had the tiny lenses and electronic cameras that we need to explore this miniature world. But when we meet its inhabitants face to face, we suddenly realise that their behaviour can be just as meaningful to us as the behaviour of many animals more our own size.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Opening narration
Life in the Undergrowth (2005)

World , Way , Animals

“Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with "bits" in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.”

Italo Calvino book Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988) , "Lightness"
English translation: Patrick Creagh (1996).

World , Travel , Exercises , Light

“A truly rational theory would allow us to deduce the elementary particles (electron, etc.) and not be forced to state them a priori.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to Michele Besso (10 September 1952), Letter n°190, Correspondance, 1903-1955 (1972), by Pierre Speziali and Michele Angelo Besso
1950s

“My brother Fairchild has just bought himself an "electronic janitor", a costly device which, I understand, keeps his house at an even temperature of 70 degrees without any effort on his part whatsoever. I don't know quite how it works, but it has something to do with molecules and the quantum theory.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

Understanding , Effort , Parting , Housing

“Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness…This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

Men , Communication , Universe , Christ

“Here we are, sixty something human minds. We’ve been migrated—while still awake—right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and we’re now running as software in an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn’t let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother’s old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 5 (“Router”), p. 184

Way , Home , Intelligence , Idea

“Anything that can hold an electronic charge can hold a fiscal charge.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

“It is no coincidence, I am sure, that those who have the most to say about the Project are the ones who have had no direct contact with it. Which is similar to the attitude physicists have regarding gravitation or electrons — as opposed to that of the "well-informed" who read popular science. The "well-informed" think they know something about matters that the experts are reluctant to even to speak of. Information at second hand always gives an impression of tidiness, in contrast with the data at the scientist's disposal, full of gaps and uncertainties.”

Stanisław Lem book His Master's Voice

Source: His Master's Voice (1968), Ch. 1

Thinking , Science , Reading

“The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.”

Ayn Rand book Philosophy: Who Needs It

Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982)

Soul , Universe

“A watch is much more than a list of functionality and features… the bottom line is this is fashion, this is image, this something that is on our skin that we want to wear, and it’s not just another electronic gadget that becomes obsolete…. there is an emotional character to it.”

Philippe Kahn (1952) Entrepreneur, camera phone creator

The Growth Show podcast, April 15th, 2015, regarding why some smartwatches to date have failed https://soundcloud.com/the-growth-show/apple-watch-special.

Fashion

“Do electrons exist, or are they merely fictious ideas for the ordering of observations (sense date, classical events)?… If there are only sensations, then terms such as 'election or 'St. Augustine' are auxiliary terms, designed to bring some order into our experiences.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

Science in a Free Society (1978)

Idea , Sense

“Back in the mid-1990s I was researching strategy in the global electronics industry. I interviewed 20 to 30 executives, CEOs, and division managers and asked fairly simple questions. Which company was the leader in their market? How did that company become the leader? What’s their own company’s strategy?
I saw an interesting pattern. Most executives easily explained how companies became market leaders: Some sort of window of opportunity opened, and the leader was the company that was the first to successfully jump through that window. Not exactly the first mover but the first to get it right.
But when I asked these same executives about their own strategies, I heard a lot about doorknob polishing. They were doing 360-degree feedback, forming alliances, outsourcing, cutting costs, and so on. None of them even mentioned taking a good position quickly when the industry changes.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

About strategy starts with identifying changes, and companies taking position (1)
"McKinsey Quarterly interview," 2007

Question , Change

“This theme of mismeasurement interacts with the designation of the one hundred years between 1870 and 1970 as the “special century.” Measurement errors are greatest in the early years, both in the scope of the standard of living and in the extent of price index bias. Clearly the welfare benefits to consumers in the categories of life entirely omitted from GDP were greatest long ago: the transition from the scrub board to the automatic washing machine was a more important contributor to consumer welfare than the shift from manual to electronic washing machine controls or from a twelve-pound tub to an eighteen pound tub. The most important unmeasured benefit of all, the extension of life expectancy, occurred much more rapidly from 1890 to 1950 than afterward.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Source: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016, p. 13

Life , Error

“In the dark ages before the invention of the electronic vacuum tube there were many legends of living statues and magic pictures. One of the commonest devices of sorcerers and witches was the model of an enemy which somehow embodied his soul, so that injury to the model would be reflected by suffering or death of the original… Idolatry, witchcraft and other superstitions are so deeply rooted and widespread that it is possible that even the most detached scientific activity may be psychologically equivalent to them; such activity may help to satisfy the desire for power, to assuage the fear of the unknown or to compensate for the flatness of everyday existence.”

William Grey Walter (1910–1977) American-born British neuroscientist and roboticist

Source: An imitation of life (1950), p. 42.

Death , Age , Fear , Soul

“About 70 years ago, only a small number of “elementary particles”, thought to be the basic building blocks of matter, were known: the proton, the electron, and the photon as the quantum of radiation. All these particles are stable (the neutron is stable only in nuclear matter, the free neutron decays by beta decay: n→p+e−+\overline{\nu}). Owing to the availability of large accelerators, this picture of a few elementary particles has profoundly changed: today, the standard reference Review of Particle Properties lists more than 100 particles. The number is still growing as the energies and luminosities of accelerators are increased.”

Walter Greiner (1935–2016) German physicist

Source: Quantum Chromatodynamics (3rd ed., 2007), Ch. 1 : The Introduction of Quarks

Change

“Theories of the postmodern - whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation - bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized "postindustrial society"(Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society, or high tech and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Source: Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Chapter 1: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Family , Law , Question , Strong

“Mr. Magoo Rule: Text and graphics must be easily distinguished and recognized. Don ́t make your audience members feel like the vision challenged Mr. Magoo—viewers of an electronic slideshow should not risk eyestrain!”

Stephen Kosslyn (1948) American psychologist

Source: Better PowerPoint (R), 2010, p. 11

Feeling

“… Why is the muon, some dumb particle, 200 times heavier than the electron? Why is the proton about 2,000 times heavier than the electron? Why is the electric charge of the electron what it is? Why are there six quarks in nature? Why not seven or eleven or five? There are many, many "why" questions. Also a number of 'how' questions. What is the mechanism that causes the weak interactions to be weak and the electromagnetic interactions not weak?”

Sheldon L. Glashow (1932) American theoretical physicist

The Elegant Universe, NOVA Interview (2003)

Question , Nature , Time

“One of our competitors is a manufacturer in Japan who wants to capture every one of your entertainment dollars transporting all your content between all of your electronic devices on their memory sticks. We are not that company. And there is another company out there who doesn't care what you do, as long as you do it on their operating system. We are not that company either.”

Reggie Fils-Aimé (1961) American businessman

Regarding Sony and Microsoft, respectively
On Nintendo's competitors
Source: E3 2004

Memory

“I came to MIT from Harvard University, where I was a lecturer. I had been at the Harvard Psychoacoustic Laboratory during World War II and stayed on at Harvard as a lecturer, mainly doing research, but also a little bit of teaching—statistics and physiological psychology—subjects like that.
Then there came a time that I thought that I had better go pay attention to my career. I had just been having a marvelous time there. I am not a good looker for jobs; I just came to the nearest place I could, which was in our city. I arranged to come down here and start up a psychology section, which we hoped would eventually become a psychology department. For the purposes of having a base of some kind I was in the Electrical Engineering Department. I even taught a little bit of electrical engineering.
I fell in love with the summer study process that MIT had. They had one on undersea warfare and overseas transport—a thing called Project Hartwell. I really liked that. It was getting physicists, mathematicians—everybody who could contribute—to work very intensively for a period of two or three months. After Hartwell there was a project called Project Charles, which was actually two years long (two summers and the time in between). It was on air defense. I was a member of that study. They needed one psychologist and 20 physicists. That led to the creation of the Lincoln Laboratory. It got started immediately as the applied section of the Research Laboratory for Electronics, which was already a growing concern at MIT.”

J. C. R. Licklider (1915–1990) American psychologist and computer scientist

Licklider in: " An Interview with J. C. R. LICKLIDER http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107436/1/oh150jcl.pdf" conducted by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg on 28 October 1988, Cambridge, MA.

Love , War , World , Hope

“Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things electronic.”

Rupert Murdoch (1931) Australian-American media mogul

Source: The 64-gigabyte shape of the future, Washington Post, May 7, 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/06/AR2010050603353.html

“The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to “the Africa within.””

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 51

“The Kindle is the most successful electronic book-reading tablet so far, but that’s not saying much; Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of e-book reader projects.”

David Pogue (1963) Technology writer, journalist and commentator

" The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/technology/personaltech/24pogue.html," The New York Times, February 24, 2009.

Books , Reading , Success

“if a shower of electrons is shot on to a zinc sulfide screen, a number of flashes are produced - one for each electron - and we may picture the electrons as bullet-like projectiles hitting a target. But if the same shower is made to pass near a suspended magnet, this is found to be deflected as the electrons go by. The electrons may now be pictured as octopus-like structures with tentacles or 'tubes of force' sticking out from it in every direction.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

“As the pattern of events is unaltered by motion, the mechanism must be the same when the electron is in motion as when it is at rest. But experiment shows that an electron in motion exerts additional forces which are not the same for all directions in space; if we picture this electron as moving head-foremost through space, these forces surround it like a belt around its waist.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

“Somebody will ask those of us who compose with the aid of computers: 'So you make all these decisions for the computer or the electronic medium but wouldn't you like to have a performer who makes certain other decisions?' Many composers don't mind collaborating with the performer with regards to decisions of tempo, or rhythm, or dynamics, or timbre, but ask them if they would allow the performer to make decisions with regard to pitch and the answer will be 'Pitches you don't change.' Some of us feel the same way in regard to the other musical aspects that are traditionally considered secondary, but which we consider fundamental. As for the future of electronic music, it seems quite obvious to me that its unique resources guarantee its use, because it has shifted the boundaries of music away from the limitations of the acoustical instrument, of the performer's coordinating capabilities, to the almost infinite limitations of the electronic instrument. The new limitations are the human ones of perception.”

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) American composer

Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812.

Music , Way , Feeling , Quotes

“Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 30

World

“The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Tyuonyi, Volumes 1-2, 1985, p. 60
1980s

Family , Way , Communication , Sense

“You will get your difficulties with the point electron.”

Paul Ehrenfest (1880–1933) Dutch physicist

as quoted by Hendrik Casimir in an interview http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4550_1.html by Thomas Kuhn, Léon Rosenfeld, Aage Bohr and Erik Ruedinger at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Copenhagen, 5 and 6 July, 1963.
Attributed

“The quantum theory, as it is now constituted, presents us with a very great challenge, if we are at all interested in such a venture, for in quantum physics there is no consistent notion at all of what the reality may be that underlies the universal constitution and structure of matter. Thus, if we try to use the prevailing world view based on the notions of particles, we discover that the 'particles' (such as electrons) can also manifest as waves, that they move discontinuously, that there are no laws at all that apply in detail to the actual movements of individual particles and that only statistical predictions can be made about large aggregates of such particles. If on the other hand we apply the world view in which the world is regarded as a continuous field, we find that this field must also be discontinuous, as well as particle-like, and that it is as undermined in its actual behaviour as is required in the particle view of relation as a whole.”

David Bohm book Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)

World , Law , Reality , Universe

“The hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Generation A (2009)

Life , World , Time

“There are three [Apple Watch] lineups that range in price from "just" $350 for an Apple Sport stripper model with low-end materials to an astonishing $17,000 for an 18 karat gold silly version. As I noted on Twitter, this isn't consumer electronics anymore. It's consumerism run amok.”

Paul Thurrott (1966) American podcaster, author, and blogger

Apple Event Recap: Apple Watch, MacBook, and Apple TV http://thurrott.com/mobile/1927/apple-event-recap-apple-watch-macbook-and-apple-tv in Thurrott - News & Analysis for Tech Enthusiasts (9 March 2015)

Sport

“The issue of 'science' does not intrude itself directly upon the occasion of the performance of a musical work, at least a non-electronically produced work, since—as has been said—there is at least a question as to whether the question as to whether musical composition is to be regarded as a science or not is indeed really a question; but there is no doubt that the question as to whether musical discourse or—more precisely—the theory of music should be subject to the methodological criteria of scientific method and the attendant scientific language is a question, except that the question is really not the normative one of whether it 'should be' or 'must be,' but the factual one that it is, not because of the nature of musical theory, but because of the nature and scope of scientific method and language, whose domain of application is such that if it is not extensible to musical theory, then musical theory is not a theory in any sense in which the term ever has been employed. This should sound neither contentious nor portentous, rather it should be obvious to the point of virtual tautology.”

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) American composer

From Milton Babbitt, "The Structure and Function of Musical Theory", College Music Symposium, Vol. 5 (Fall 1965), pp. 49-60; reprinted in Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory, ed. Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 10-21, ISBN 0393005488, and in Milton Babbitt, The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. Stephen Peles, with Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, and Joseph N. Straus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 191-201, ISBN 0691089663.

Music , Question , Nature , Sense

“There's no reason that patients can't have electronic access to their complete medical history… Just as people can check their bank account information online or using their ATM card, patients who want to should have electronic access to their medical records…”

Paul Ryan (1970) American politician

Press release: [2007-07-12, Ryan Coauthors Electronic Medical Records Bill to Reduce Medical Errors, Lower Health Care Costs, paulryan.house.gov, http://paulryan.house.gov/news/documentprint.aspx?DocumentID=201797, 2012-09-30]

People , History

“Heisenberg finds that facts of observation lead uniquely and inevitably to the theoretical structure known as matrix mechanics. This shows that the total radiation in any region of empty space can change only by a single complete quantum at a time. Thus not only in the photo-electric phenomenon, but in all other transfers of energy through space, energy is always transferred by complete quanta; fractions of a quantum can never occur. This brings atomicity into our picture of radiation just as definitely as the discovery of the electron and its standard charge brought atomicity into our picture of matter and of electricity.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Photo , Change , Time

“In electron microscopy, the difficulties took considerably more time to surmount, and therefore the doubters held the field for a longer period. I can, however, also confirm from my own experience the observation of my colleagues that the doubt of the others has the advantage of leaving the field uncrowded. Mostly, this is understood only much later, in the beginning one is very disappointed.”

Ernst Ruska (1906–1988) German physicist

On the advantage of facing doubt when one has discovered something new. Speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1986 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1986/ruska-speech.html.

Disappointment , Time

“An electron is real; a probability is not.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 19, The Quantum Gadget, Quantum weirdness brought to light, p. 172

“The quantum world is a world of waves, not particles. So we have to think of electron waves and proton waves and so on. Matter is 'incoherent' when all its waves have a different wavelength, implying a different momentum. On the other hand, if you take a pure quantum system – the electrons in a superconducting magnet, or the atoms in a laser – they are all in phase with one another, and they demonstrate the wave nature of matter on a large scale. Then you can see quite visibly what matter is down at its heart.”

Carver Mead (1934) American computer scientist

"An Interview with Carver Mead", American Spectator, Sep/Oct2001, Vol. 34 Issue 7, p68.

World , Nature , Thinking , Heart