TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index I > Category: Instrumentation

Instrumentation Quotes (4 quotes)

Fractals are patterns which occur on many levels. This concept can be applied to any musical parameter. I make melodic fractals, where the pitches of a theme I dream up are used to determine a melodic shape on several levels, in space and time. I make rhythmic fractals, where a set of durations associated with a motive get stretched and compressed and maybe layered on top of each other. I make loudness fractals, where the characteristic loudness of a sound, its envelope shape, is found on several time scales. I even make fractals with the form of a piece, its instrumentation, density, range, and so on. Here I’ve separated the parameters of music, but in a real piece, all of these things are combined, so you might call it a fractal of fractals.
Interview (1999) on The Discovery Channel. As quoted by Benoit B. Manelbrot and Richard Hudson in The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward (2010), 133.
Science quotes on:  |  Applied (176)  |  Associated (2)  |  Call (781)  |  Characteristic (154)  |  Combined (3)  |  Compressed (3)  |  Concept (242)  |  Density (25)  |  Determine (152)  |  Dream (222)  |  Duration (12)  |  Envelope (6)  |  Form (976)  |  Fractal (11)  |  Layer (41)  |  Layered (2)  |  Level (69)  |  Loudness (3)  |  Motive (62)  |  Music (133)  |  Musical (10)  |  Occur (151)  |  Other (2233)  |  Parameter (4)  |  Pattern (116)  |  Piece (39)  |  Pitch (17)  |  Range (104)  |  Real (159)  |  Rhythmic (2)  |  Scale (122)  |  Science And Art (195)  |  Separate (151)  |  Set (400)  |  Shape (77)  |  Sound (187)  |  Space (523)  |  Space And Time (38)  |  Stretch (39)  |  Stretched (2)  |  Theme (17)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Time (1911)  |  Time And Space (39)  |  Top (100)

I became expert at dissecting crayfish. At one point I had a crayfish claw mounted on an apparatus in such a way that I could operate the individual nerves. I could get the several-jointed claw to reach down and pick up a pencil and wave it around. I am not sure that what I was doing had much scientific value, although I did learn which nerve fiber had to be excited to inhibit the effects of another fiber so that the claw would open. And it did get me interested in robotic instrumentation, something that I have now returned to. I am trying to build better micromanipulators for surgery and the like.
In Jeremy Bernstein, 'A.I.', The New Yorker (14 Dec 1981).
Science quotes on:  |  Apparatus (70)  |  Better (493)  |  Build (211)  |  Claw (8)  |  Dissect (2)  |  Doing (277)  |  Down (455)  |  Effect (414)  |  Excite (17)  |  Expert (67)  |  Fiber (16)  |  Individual (420)  |  Inhibit (4)  |  Interest (416)  |  Joint (31)  |  Learn (672)  |  Manipulate (11)  |  Mount (43)  |  Nerve (82)  |  Open (277)  |  Operate (19)  |  Pencil (20)  |  Pick Up (5)  |  Point (584)  |  Reach (286)  |  Research (753)  |  Return (133)  |  Robot (14)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Something (718)  |  Surgery (54)  |  Trying (144)  |  Value (393)  |  Wave (112)  |  Way (1214)

It required unusual inquisitiveness to pursue the development of scientific curiosities such as charged pith balls, the voltaic cell, and the electrostatic machine. Without such endeavors and the evolution of associated instrumentation, initially of purely scientific interest, most of the investigations that lead to the basic equations of electromagnetism would have been missed. … We would have been deprived of electromagnetic machinery as well as knowledge of electromagnetic waves.
From The Science Matrix: The Journey, Travails, Triumphs (1992, 1998), 14.
Science quotes on:  |  Ball (64)  |  Basic (144)  |  Charge (63)  |  Curiosity (138)  |  Deprived (2)  |  Development (441)  |  Electromagnetic Wave (2)  |  Electromagnetism (19)  |  Electrostatic (7)  |  Endeavor (74)  |  Equation (138)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Inquisitiveness (6)  |  Interest (416)  |  Investigation (250)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Lead (391)  |  Machine (271)  |  Machinery (59)  |  Miss (51)  |  Missed (2)  |  Most (1728)  |  Purely (111)  |  Pursue (63)  |  Required (108)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Unusual (37)  |  Voltaic (9)  |  Wave (112)

Modern technology has lost its magic. No longer do people stand in awe, thrilled by the onward rush of science, the promise of a new day. Instead, the new is suspect. It arouses our hostility as much as it used to excite our fancy. With each breakthrough there are recurrent fears and suspicion. How will the advance further pollute our lives; modern technology is not merely what it first appears to be. Behind the white coats, the disarming jargon, the elaborate instrumentation, and at the core of what has often seemed an automatic process, one finds what Dorothy found in Oz: modern technology is human after all.
In Science and Liberation edited by Rita Arditti, Pat Brennan, and Steve Cavrak (1980).
Science quotes on:  |  Advance (298)  |  Awe (43)  |  Behind (139)  |  Breakthrough (18)  |  Core (20)  |  Do (1905)  |  Elaborate (31)  |  Fancy (50)  |  Fear (212)  |  Find (1014)  |  First (1302)  |  Hostility (16)  |  Human (1512)  |  Jargon (13)  |  Live (650)  |  Magic (92)  |  Merely (315)  |  Modern (402)  |  New (1273)  |  People (1031)  |  Process (439)  |  Promise (72)  |  Stand (284)  |  Suspicion (36)  |  Technology (281)  |  Thrill (26)  |  White (132)  |  Will (2350)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.