Nathan Myhrvold Quotes
If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun!
If you talk about sous-vide, then you have to talk about food safety, and microbiology, and heat.
Nobody wants a prediction that the future will be more or less like the present, even if that is, statistically speaking, an excellent prediction.
Words can hurt you. In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle ways.
Chefs think about what it's like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works.
For relatively modest amounts of sulfur dioxide injected into the atmosphere, you could easily cool Earth by 1% or more, if you want.
No CEO ever says, 'Damnit, we need to increase research!' I want to encourage them to do that.
The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside.
Cooking is for chefs. Science informs us and lets us cook while knowing what we are doing, but it is not a replacement for the skills of a chef.
Most decisions are seat-of-the-pants judgments. You can create a rationale for anything. In the end, most decisions are based on intuition and faith.
Nuclear energy is a baseload - meaning it's power that you can run any time you want, day or night - and carbon-free.
Technological 'revolutions' don't really overthrow anything - they simply append a new and dynamic market to that which went before.
Efficiency in government is a more elusive concept than efficiency in the private economy, which may be measured relatively easily as output per units of input. What is the government's 'output?'
The world has shown that if you provide capital and expertise to an area that is starved for capital and expertise, really good things will happen.
One of the problems with posing a 'bold new plan' is that you can't just extrapolate from previous plans.
I've never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I could avoid doing it... Lawsuits are a ridiculous way to do business.
Microsoft, Apple, Facebook all bought huge patent portfolios to further their strategic game. They're doing what I'm doing!
Among modern occupations, only cult leaders and TV weathermen rival the technological visionary's ability to retain credibility despite all evidence to the contrary.
The prize for ultimate inefficiency goes to America. We have built in so many checks and balances that our 'leaders' are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on Earth.
One of the ugly secrets of the renewable-energy industry is that its products make no economic sense unless they are highly subsidized.
An efficient government is dangerous in the hands of the wrong man. Sadly, the right sort of man never seems interested in the job.
By burning nuclear waste as fuel, we believe we can power the United States cleanly for hundreds of years without ever touching new resources.
I wanted to figure out how long to cook things. I did some experiments and then wrote a program using Mathematica to model how heat is transferred through food.
Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.
Our goal was to show people a vision of food they hadn't seen before. So, I had this idea of... let's cut all these things in half, and show a picture of the food in the pan, in the oven.
People who grow up in a region doubtless have a better cultural awareness of their own cuisine, but it's also true that a lot of locals go to McDonald's, Applebee's and the like.
The magic words 'on the Internet,' if inserted into nearly any sentence, seem to protect it from normal critical scrutiny.
Researchers who examined the voting records of wine judges found that 90 percent of the time they give inconsistent ratings to a particular wine when they judge it on multiple occasions.
Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.
When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.'
I have a very pragmatic approach to diets. Ones you can't stick to don't do you any good. Some people say, 'Just eat half of what's on your plate,' but I can't do that!
Many of the things the slow food people honor were innovations within historical times. Somebody had to be the first European to eat a tomato.
Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less!
Crazy ideas sometimes work, and the technological society that we have is built on a foundation of those crazy ideas that work.
If people don't find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important.
I think that there is a role for food to be art; and when food is art, it can have drama, it can have spectacle, it can be theatrical. It can be this amazing experience.
A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA.
It is better to predict dramatic things that don't happen than boring things that do.
It's impossible that we're alone in the universe. Every time we think we're more special than others, we're proven wrong.
What you do on a dinosaur expedition is you hike and look at the ground. You find bones sticking out of the dirt and, once you see something, you dig.
