Neil Gershenfeld Quotes

Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things.

For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork.

Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don't know, not a weakness to avoid.

There is so much blandness and grayness out there, people want to be able to say "it's mine." They want to customize their cars like they customize a jeans jacket.

The real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems.

Computer science is one of the worst things that ever happened to either computers or to science.

Chaos has come to be associated with the study of anything complex, but, in fact, the mathematical techniques are directly applicable only to simple systems that appear to be complex.