Neil Gershenfeld
speaker
1,202 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2023
last heard May 2023
Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You know, where do ideas come from?
So I had mentioned Vannevar Bush and...
He wrote a really influential thing called The Endless Frontier.
So science won World War II.
The more known story is nuclear bombs.
The less well-known story is the Rad Lab.
So at MIT, an amazing group of people invented radar, which is really credited as winning the war.
So after the war, a grand old man from MIT, and it's...
was charged with science won the war, how do we maintain that edge?
And the report he wrote led to the National Science Foundation and the modern notion we take for granted, but didn't really exist before then, of public funding of research, of research agencies.
Mm-hmm.
In it, he made, again, what I consider an important mistake, which is he described basic research leads to applied research, leads to applications, leads to commercialization, leads to impact.
And so we need to invest in that pipeline.
The reason I considered a mistake is that
Almost all of the examples we've been talking about in my lab went backwards, that the basic research came from applications.
And further, almost all of the examples we've been talking about came fundamentally from mistakes.
So essentially everything I've ever worked on has failed.
Mm-hmm.
But in failing, something better happened.
So the way I like to describe it is ready, aim, fire is you do your homework.
Showing 721–740 of 1,202 · page 37 of 61
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