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 such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.
The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting.
When the problem [quantum chromodynamics] is finally solved, it will all be by imagination. Then there will be some big thing about the great way it was done. But it's simple -it will all be by imagination, and persistence.
Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.
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