Women Scientists From The United States

"Neutrinos are fundamental subatomic particles produced in nuclear reactions, like those in the sun. We always talk about the fact that we can’t see neutrinos or dark matter and that basically they’re invisible, but if you think about it from the other side, we’re also invisible to them."

"The Big Bang theory has been extremely successful in describing the history and evolution of the Universe, and new experiments and observations continue to confirm the basic predictions of this theory. But we do not yet know the answer to the question"

"Nothing in nature or the cosmos is ever completely still — as I write this, several wild Mallards have returned to the Museum courtyard and are creating a frantic spectacle of water and wings as they dive and attack in their annual spring ritual. Further from home, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 56 million light years from Earth has recently been observed to be spinning at close to the speed of light."

"The Saturday arguments about photography as a machine art are answered by the best photographers. "If the camera were a machine!" Berenice Abbott said, "with the precision and the flexibility, the accommodation and power of machines as we know them today!" And "Our lighting has not been begun," she said. "We need a light as good as sunlight-better than sunlight.""

"People say they have to express their emotions. I’m sick of that. Photography doesn’t teach you how to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see."

"I wanted to photograph this subject because the signs’ shrieking blatancy literally cried out for a visual record. To my mind the faded, yellowing paper and the red paint were not particularly paint,able. In black and white the signs shouted, clamored for attention, in visual anarchy. At the same time, the shrewd business sense which plastered them solid over the entire window area produced, as it were by chance, an esthetic by-product: the whole has homogeneity and variety of texture, simultaneously, which give the picture interest."

"Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself."

"I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism—real life—the now."

"The Baroness was like Jesus Christ and Shakespeare all rolled into one and perhaps she was the most influential person to me in the early part of my life."

"Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage: a myriad-faceted picture containing the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture."

"We build our computers the way we build our cities--over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."

"I have a suggestion for Microsoft — no fancy programming required. Just let us users hang out a "Do Not Disturb" sign. Then leave us alone. We're dreaming."

"To listen to Mr. Engelbart that day almost five years ago was to realize that the computer industry, when it started, was not simply about becoming a chief executive or retiring on stock options at 35. It was to remember that real innovation — the stuff that made computers so much more than "crummy factors of production" — comes from mysterious places, wild people, dreamers and tinkerers, and to remember all the skepticism they had to endure."

"“In the early days of MARC, there was a small team of people dedicated to one thing—getting the MARC Pilot Project underway. It was a team spirit that I shall never forget…."

"From the beginning…you (the ALA) have welcomed and supported me. Tonight you have gone one step further—you have adopted me.” She later explained, “It was at that moment, and ever after, that I regarded myself as a librarian."

"In my opinion, libraries and librarians are needed more than ever, and the literature is noting this more often. In the development of MARC, it was clear to me that we needed two talents, i.e., computer expertise and library expertise. Neither talent could have succeeded alone. We need this more than ever today. Librarians must become computer literate so that they can understand the relationship between the technology applied and the discipline of their profession."

"I believe the Internet is a great technical achievement. However, when it comes to the organization of information so that we can locate, select, and distinguish among bibliographic items for serious research, the Internet has a long way to go."

"It’s an honor. ALA has been one of the closest organizations I’ve been involved with; I’ve worked with people at ALA since day one. ALA has been a great supporter and a big help to me. People were the most rewarding part, all the people I got to know, the support from people around the world. I couldn’t have done it all myself without all that help."

"Yes, I noted that there were hardly any or no women in certain high level positions. But as time passed, I, along with others, did attain, and with pride for managing to do so, a series of positions in the ladder."

"As I advanced in my career in librarianship, I have been a woman in a man’s world. However, this issue has not been an important factor in my thinking."

"It's easy to sleep floating around — it's very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don't float into somebody or something!"

"When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen. So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion — because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do."

"There might be very primitive life in our solar system — single-cell animals, that sort of thing. We may know the answer to that in five or ten years. There is very likely to be life in other solar systems, in planets around other stars. But we won't know about that for a long time."

"When you're on Earth, if you go to the top of a mountain, the stars look much brighter than they do at sea level. And because the space shuttle is above Earth's atmosphere, it's like being on a very, very high mountain. So they look brighter, but not bigger."

"The view of Earth is spectacular. The shuttle is pretty close to Earth. It only flies between 200 and 350 miles above Earth. So it's really pretty close. So we don't see the whole planet, like the astronauts who went to the moon did. So we can see much more detail. We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form. It's just a lot of fun and very interesting to look out the window."

"It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission. It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission. So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight. Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight."

"In fact, one of the most frustrating aspects of systems is that the purposes of subunits may add up to an overall behavior that no one wants."

"Mesarovic and Pestel are critical of the Forrester-Meadows world view, which is that of a homogeneous system with a fully predetermined evolution in time once the initial conditions are specified."

"When asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she'd always say that we have exactly enough time – starting now."

"The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole."

"When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential."

"A quantity growing exponentially toward a limit reaches that limit in a surprisingly short time."

"There always will be limits to growth."

"In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving growth and at least one balancing feedback loop constraining growth, because no system can grow forever in a finite environment."

"A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes the system likely to oscillate."

"The least obvious part of a system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system's behavior."

"No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. [...] But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren't designed to produce them, if we don't speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist."

"Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can't measure. Think about that for a minute. It means that we make quantity more important than quality."

"You've seen how information holds system together and how delayed, biased, scattered, or missing information can make feedback loops malfunction. Decision-makers can respond to information they don't have, can't respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, and can't respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information. [...] Information is power."

"Why are they [people] more likely to listen to people who tell them they can't make changes than they are to people who tell them they can?"

"How is it that one way of seeing the world becomes so widely shared that institutions, technologies, production systems, buildings, cities, become shaped around that way of seeing?"

"The shared idea in the mind of society, the great big unstated assumptions, constitute that society's paradigm, or deepest beliefs about how the world works. [...] people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems."

"Even people within systems don't often recognize what whole-system goal they are serving. "To make profits", most corporations would say, but that's just a rule, a necessary condition to stay in the game. What is the point of the game? To grow, to increase market share, to bring the world (customers, suppliers, regulators) more and more under the control of the corporation, so that its operations becomes ever more shielded from uncertainty."

"Power over the rules is real power. That's why lobbyists congregate when Congress writes laws, and why the Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution – the rules for writing the rules – has even more power than Congress. If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them."

"Growth has costs as well as benefits, and we typically don't count the costs – among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, and so on – the whole list of problems that we are trying to solve with growth! What is needed is much slower growth, very different kinds of growth, and in some cases no growth or negative growth. The world's leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they're pushing it with all their might in the wrong direction."

"These examples confuse effort with result, one of the most common mistakes of this kind is designing systems around the wrong goal. Maybe the worst mistake this kind has been the adoption of the GNP as the measure of national economic success. [...] If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency."

"Economic theory as derived from Adam Smith assumes first that homo economicus acts with perfect optimality on complete information, and second that when many of the species homo economicus do that, their actions add up to the best possible outcome for everybody. Neither of these assumptions stands up long against the evidence."

"Bounded rationality means that people make quite reasonable decisions based on the information they have. But they don't have perfect information, especially about more distant parts of the system. [...] We don't even interpret perfectly the imperfect information that we do have, say behavioral scientists. [...] Which is to say, we don't even make decisions that optimize our own individual good, much less the good of the system as a whole."

"Changing the length of a delay may utterly change behavior. [...] Overshoots, oscillations, and collapses are always caused by delays."

"There always will be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed. If they aren't, they will be system-imposed. No physical entity can grow forever. If company managers, city governments, the human population do not choose and enforce their own limits to keep growth within the capacity of the supporting environment, then the environment will choose and enforce limits."