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.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again.
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
No particular theory may ever be regarded as absolutely certain.... No scientific theory is sacrosanct.
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.
An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the relations between a particular set of phenomena may be studied to the best advantage.
Medical judgment can be taught - laboriously, in long periods of training - but it cannot be neatly handed over as the occasion demands it. It is the irreplaceable and untransferable contribution that the healer makes to the suffering individual who would be healed.
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