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Harold E. Edgerton (6 Apr 1903 - 4 Jan 1990) American engineer and ultra-high-speed photographer known for freezing time by developing ultra-high-speed photography using a strobe light, to make visible that which happened too fast for the eye to see. Short biography of Harold E. Edgerton >>

Harold E. Edgerton
“Don't make me out to be an artist. I am an engineer.”

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“Don’t make me out to be an artist. I am an engineer. I am after the facts, only the facts.”

— Harold E. Edgerton

In Stopping Time: The Photographs of Harold Edgerton (1987)

More Harold E. Edgerton quotes on science >>

This quote is found in several books about the work of high-speed photography pioneer, Harold Edgeton. In each case it shows how Edgerton always asserted himself as a scientist. Nevertheless, the art world also admired his “consistently compelling body of work”1 comprising some of the “most remarkable time-motion photographs ever made.”2 This is not surprising, for his facts had a beauty, just as 19th century mathematicians could admire the beauty in an elegant formula.

Edgerton spent his entire career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Having invented ultra high flash speeds in the range of one millionth of a second, his multiple-exposure photographs could freeze motion with short stroboscopic bursts of intense light, and reveal the details of motion far beyond the capability of the human eye to detect. When he calculated the speed at which a crack spread through plate glass, it was nearly a mile a second!3

Nature bears long with those who wrong her. She is patient under abuse. But when abuse has gone too far, when the time of reckoning finally comes, she is equally slow to be appeased and to turn away her wrath. (1882) -- Nathaniel Egleston, who was writing then about deforestation, but speaks equally well about the danger of climate change today.

Carl Sagan: 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) ...(more by Sagan)

Albert Einstein: I used to wonder how it comes about that the electron is negative. Negative-positive—these are perfectly symmetric in physics. There is no reason whatever to prefer one to the other. Then why is the electron negative? I thought about this for a long time and at last all I could think was “It won the fight!” ...(more by Einstein)

Richard Feynman: It is the facts that matter, not the proofs. Physics can progress without the proofs, but we can't go on without the facts ... if the facts are right, then the proofs are a matter of playing around with the algebra correctly. ...(more by Feynman)

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