Neil Gershenfeld

that I came to understand this is a mistake that dates back to the Renaissance.

So in the Renaissance, the liberal arts emerged.

And liberal doesn't mean politically liberal.

This was the path to liberation, birth of humanism.

And so the liberal arts were the trivium, quadrivium, roughly language, natural science.

And

At that moment, what emerged was this dreadful concept of the illiberal arts.

So anything that wasn't the liberal arts was for commercial gain and was just making stuff and wasn't valid for serious study.

And so that's why we're left with learning to weld wasn't a subject for serious study.

But the means of expression have changed since the Renaissance.

So micromachining or embedded coding is every bit as expressive as painting a painting or writing a sonnet.

So never understanding this difference between computer science and physical science...

The path that led me to create CBA with colleagues was I was what's called a junior fellow at Harvard.

I was visiting MIT through Marvin because I was interested in the physics of musical instruments.

This will be another slight digression.

In Cornell, I would study physics, and then I would cross the street and go to the music department where I played the bassoon, and I would trim reeds and play the reeds.

And they'd be beautiful, but then they'd get soggy.

And then I discovered in the basement of the music department at Cornell was David Borden.

who you might not have heard of, but is legendary in electronic music because he was really the first electronic musician.

So Bob Moog, who invented Moog synthesizers, was a physics student at Cornell, like me, crossing the street.