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.
It's becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics.
Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem.
Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?
Our role is to develop techniques that allow us to provide emergency life-saving procedures to injured patients in an extreme, remote environment without the presence of a physician.
In fourth grade, I was interested in all areas of science. I particularly loved learning about how the earth was created.
To promote the healing response, you must get past all the grosser levels of the body - cells, tissues, organs and systems -- and arrive at a junction point between mind and matter, the point where consciousness actually starts to have an effect.
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