Technology

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
— Clarke's Third Law, Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1973.

 

What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stage coaches! We should as soon expect the people … to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve’s ricochet rockets as to trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine going at such a rate.
— Letter to the Quarterly Review, March 1825.

 

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
— Richard W. Hamming, Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers, 2nd edition, 1973.

 

It is paradoxical: people in the age of science and technology live in the conviction that they can improve their lives because they are able to grasp and exploit the complexities of nature and the general laws of its functioning. Yet it is precisely these laws which, in the end, tragically catch up on them and get the better of them.
— Vaclav Havel, Czech playwright (and later president), ‘Politics and conscience’ in Living in Truth, Faber 1989, 141.

 

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
— Elbert Hubbard (1856 – 1915).

 

Within a few years isotopes will turn up in many more expected or unexpected places — perhaps the slogan ‘Gamma Washes Whiter’, will become quite familiar to us when our ultra-sonic washing machines are equipped with some gamma source to sterilize shirts and socks and napkins.
— Egon Larsen, Atomic Energy, Pan Books, 1958, 136-7.

 

The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it furnished him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, or playwiths, but who sought to know it for the gratification of knowing.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (1772-1834).

 

Watching television, you’d think we lived at bay, in total jeopardy, surrounded on all sides by human-seeking germs, shielded against infection and death only by a chemical technology that enables us to keep killing them off.
— Lewis Thomas, (1913 – 1993), ‘Germs’ in The Lives of a Cell, Penguin, 1973.

 

The figures as they were calculated by the machine were not exhibited to the eye as in sliding rules and similar instruments, but were actually presented to the eye on two opposite sides of the machine; the number 383, for example, appearing in numbers before the person employed in copying….

While the machine was occupied in calculating [the] table, a friend of the inventor undertook to write down the numbers as they appeared. In consequence of the copyist writing quickly, he rather more than kept pace with the engine, but as soon as five figures appeared, the machine was at least equal in speed to the writer. At another trial, thirty-two numbers of the same table were calculated in the space of two minutes and thirty seconds, and as these contained eighty-two figures, the engine produced thirty-three figures every minute, or more than one figure in every two seconds. On another occasion it produced forty-four figures per minute. This rate of computation could be maintained for any length of time; it is probable that few writers are able to copy with equal speed for many hours together.
— Often credited to Sir David Brewster (1781 – 1868), but actually written by Charles Babbage, Edinburgh Philosophical Review, VII: 274. cf New Scientist 18/25 December 1980, 831.

 

Now what was it that gave Hubble the notion that the galaxies are running away from one another and that the universe is expanding? His basic discovery was made with that indispensable tool of the astronomer, the spectrograph…
— George Gamow (1904-1968), Galaxies in Flight, Scientific American Reader (1953), 7.

 

… the resulting viscous, electrically conducting jet can trigger sparkover by reducing the air gap. Fascinating side-issues of hydrodynamic stability are involved. Ordinarily such a jet would break up because of sausage-mode pinch instabilities caused by surface tension. When the jet is very close to the insulator, this normal capillary break-up is accelerated by electrostatic forces. Under some conditions, however, the reverse may be true, since such jets can be stabilized by longitudinal current-flow, produced perhaps by corona at the ends of the jet.

To simulate the phenomenon, engineers at the Bonneville Power Administration in the United States, after consultation with avian experts, designed a mechanical cloaca consisting of a pressure chamber with an adjustable-diameter orifice. A balloon within the chamber contained raw scrambled eggs (for correct viscosity) doped with salt (for correct electrical conductivity). The doping level was determined from measurements on rehydrated cage scrapings from a local zoo. A solenoid operated needle broke the balloon on command, discharging the contents.

In full-scale tests conducted at 500 kV, the mechanical cloaca operated perfectly, resulting in spectacular electrical fireworks. As a result of this study, spikes were installed on cross-arms to discourage roosting. Animal rights activists will be pleased that no living birds were injured, and that a hazard to wild birds was reduced.
— David C. Jolly, ‘Bird dropping research continues apace’, Nature 319: 625-6, 20 February, 1986.

 

Give me a firm spot to stand, and I will move the earth.
— Archimedes (287 – 212 BCE), speaking of levers.

 

Don’t talk to me of your Archimedes’ lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
— Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924), in the preface to his semi-autobiographical A Personal Record.

 

Will machines destroy emotions, or will emotions destroy machines? This question was suggested long ago by Samuel Butler in Erewhon, but it is growing more and more actual as the empire of machinery is enlarged.
— Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970), ‘Machines and the Emotions’, in Sceptical Essays.

 

Persicos odi, puer, apparatus [which translates as ‘I hate all that Persian gear, boy’]
— Horace (65 BCE – 8 BCE), Odes.

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