Zitat des Tages von Dean Kamen:
We can't live any more in a world which is based on stuff and not ideas. If you want to live with the world of stuff, we're all doomed.
If you're going to fail, you might as well fail at the big ones.
You can't look at the problem and say, 'I want them to do more, better, faster miracles - and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.' It's unrealistic.
Clearly, there are many places where diesel is king or gas-turbine is king, or IC engines will win, but there are many places in the world where, as we've seen, they just won't do the job. The modern version of the Stirling engine has some very, very attractive characteristics, and we're trying to optimize it for some of those applications.
My plane is a Premiere; it has very efficient gas turbine engines. It goes very fast on relatively little fuel. Flying has been my passion since I was a kid.
The city needs a car like a fish needs a bicycle.
I think an education is not only important, it is the most important thing you can do with your life.
Most of the time you will fail, but you will also occasionally succeed. Those occasional successes make all the hard work and sacrifice worthwhile.
Don't be irresponsible in your risks, but as long as the project can fail without it causing the person to fail, keep trying; keep taking the best shots. Learn from them; pick yourself up.
As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought.
New ideas in technology are literally a dime-a-dozen, or cheaper than that.
To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.
I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.
People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.
Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That's what technology can do.
A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention.
If history is any indication, all truths will eventually turn out to be false.
An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, if we make this part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work.
I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate.
Some broad themes brought me where I am today. At a very young age, my hobby became thinking and finding connections.
Sporting competitions seem to be what we obsess over, frankly. So if we can put engineering, science, technology into a format of healthy, fun competition, we can attract all sorts of kids that might not see the kind of activity we do as accessible or rewarding.
Our healthcare system has seen some of the greatest achievements of the human intellect since we started recording history: We're developing incredible devices and implantables to improve the quantity and quality of people's lives.
I don't work on a project unless I believe that it will dramatically improve life for a bunch of people.
The future is going to require really smart people. What we think are crises today probably will be no big deal, and we have no idea what will really be crises in the future.
My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time.
I started realizing that I wasn't so dumb; rather, most people simply didn't know the answers to the questions that I was interested in-or they didn't care.
Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.
More than ever, the world needs good engineers. However, the pool of talent is shrinking not growing.
You have teenagers thinking they're going to make millions as NBA stars when that's not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is.
My biggest failure is I have too many to talk about.
I'm a human entropy producer.
Sometimes we crash and burn. It's better to do it in private.
Nothing that has value, real value, has no cost. Not freedom, not food, not shelter, not healthcare.
Technology is how we create wealth, how we cure diseases, how we'll build an environment that's sustainable and also gives people the capacity to pull more out of this world and still leave it better than when they found it.
We're working on ways to make potable water from polluted water, whether it has organics in it or salt from the ocean, at very low energy input.
I've never had a business plan. Every project we've ever done was the intersection of somebody with a real need, a real passion to do something, and hustling.
