Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.
Interpretation
Innovative ideas can lead to unexpected life-saving solutions.
Neil Degrasse Tyson highlights how a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope inadvertently prompted new ideas that have ultimately contributed to saving lives. This illustrates the notion that imperfections and challenges in technology can spur creativity and lead to positive outcomes beyond their original purpose.
In practice
In a speech about innovation, one might say, 'As Neil Degrasse Tyson wisely noted, many advancements arise from unexpected sources.'
The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.
As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.
In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.
If the government regulates against use of drones or stem cells or artificial intelligence, all that means is that the work and the research leave the borders of that country and go someplace else.
There are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity. There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time.
The more one chases the quanta, the better they hide themselves.
Cancer is a disease of the genome. And that's what happens. You make mistakes in a cell somewhere in your body that causes it to start to grow when it should've stopped, and that's cancer. And those mistakes are mistakes of DNA.
A study of Disease-of Pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast-is certainly being pursue in the laboratories of more than one great country. Blight to destroy crops, Anthrax to slay horses and cattle, Plague to poison not armies but whole districts - such are the lines along which military science is remorselessly advancing.
Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.
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