Inventors

"Although Professor Carver impresses every one who meets him with the extent of his knowledge in the matter of plant life, he is quite the most modest man I have ever met."

"Professor Carver, like the other men I have mentioned, is of unmixed African blood, and is one of the most thoroughly scientific men of the Negro race with whom I am acquainted. Whenever anyone who takes a scientific interest in cotton. Whenever any one who takes a scientific interest in cotton growing, or in the natural history of this part of the world, comes to visit Tuskegee, he invariably seeks out and consults Professor Carver."

"His work was his life, and by not diluting it with wrathful forays against the ignorance of prejudice he was able to make his own unique and most vital contribution to racial amity."

"If we were asked what living man had the worst start and the best finish, we would say, Dr. Carver. It's a great loss to us that we have no one like him in England."

"Dr. George Washington Carver was one of the wonders of this age... Those who believe and teach that a man's heritage determines his spiritual, mental and physical traits will be hard put to explain the source of Dr. Carver's amazing intellect."

"Dr. Carver left a legacy of hope and beacon light pointing to opportunities of the future... This Negro scientist who was born of slave parents succeeded by hard work and exalted vision to the stature of one of the most outstanding agricultural research scientists in the world.""

"[He] achieved a place as one of the foremost scientists of all the world for all time."

"The scientific discoveries and experiments of Dr. Carver have done more to alleviate the one-crop agricultural system in the South than any other thing that has been done in the history of the United States."

"From Carver's small laboratory at Tuskegee came formulas in agricultural chemistry that enriched the entire Southland, indeed the whole of America and the world."

"When Dr. Carver died, the United States lost one of her finest Christian gentleman. He was a good friend of my father and mother and I had known him for forty-seven years. To the world, he was known as a scientist. Those who knew him best, however, realized that this outstanding characteristic was a strong feeling of the eminence of God. Everything he was and did found its origin in that strong ans continuous feeling."

"Although a few refer to George Washington Carver, whose research in agricultural products helped to revive the economy of the South when the throne of King Cotton began to totter, they ignore the contribution of Norbert Rillieux, whose invention of an evaporating pan revolutionized the process of sugar refining. How many people know that the multimillion-dollar United Shoe Machinery Company developed from the shoe-lasting machine invented in the last century by a Negro from Dutch Guiana, Jan Matzeliger, or that Granville T. Woods, an expert in electric motors, whose many patents speeded the growth and improvement of the railroads at the beginning of this century, was a Negro?"

"From crippling circumstance, George Washington Carver made for himself an imperishable niche in the annals of science."

"From oppressive and crippling surroundings, George Washington Carver lifted his searching, creative mind to the ordinary peanut, and found therein extraordinary possibilities for goods and products unthinkable by minds of the past."

"The versatility of his genius and his achievements in diverse branches of the arts and sciences were truly amazing. The versatility of his genius All mankind is the beneficiary of his discoveries in the field of agricultural chemistry. The things which he achieved in the face of early handicaps will for all time afford an inspiration of youth everywhere. The things, which he achieved in the face of early handicaps, will for all time afford an inspiration of youth everywhere. I count it a great privilege to have met Dr. Carver and to have talked with him at Tuskegee on the occasion of my visit to the institute, which was the scene of his long and distinguished labors."

"Professor Carver, who teaches scientific agriculture, botany, agricultural chemistry, etc., at Tuskegee, is, as regards complexion and features, an absolute Negro; but in the cut of his clothes, the accent of his speech, the soundness of his science, he might be professor of botany, not at Tuskegee, but at Oxford or Cambridge. Any European botanist of distinction, after ten minutes' conversation with this man, instinctively would treat him as a man on a level with himself."

"It is necessary for our generation to repudiate Carver and all the lesser-known black leaders who cooperated with the white design to keep their people down. We need none of their kind today. Someday, when, God willing, the struggle is over and its bitterness has faded, those men and women may be rediscovered and given their just due for working, as best they could see to do in their time and place, for their brothers and sisters. But at present their influence is pernicious, and where they still control education, in the North or the South, they must be replaced with educators who are ready to demand full equality for the oppressed races and fight for it at any cost."

"My attitude toward life was also my attitude toward science. Jesus said one must be born again, must become as a little child. He must let no laziness, no fear, no stubbornness keep him from his duty. If he were born again he would see life from such a plane he would have the energy not to be impeded in his duty by these various sidetrackers and inhibitions. My work, my life, must be in the spirit of a little child seeking only to know the truth and follow it. My purpose alone must be God's purpose - to increase the welfare and happiness of His people. Nature will not permit a vacuum. It will be filled with something. Human need is really a great spiritual vacuum which God seeks to fill... With one hand in the hand of a fellow man in need and the other in the hand of Christ, He could get across the vacuum and I became an agent. Then the passage, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me," came to have real meaning. As I worked on projects which fulfilled a real human need forces were working through me which amazed me. I would often go to sleep with an apparently insoluble problem. When I woke the answer was there. Why, then, should we who believe in Christ be so surprised at what God can do with a willing man in a laboratory? Some things must be baffling to the critic who has never been born again."

"Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater. Keep your thoughts free from hate, and you need have no fear from those who hate you."

"When our thoughts — which bring actions — are filled with hate against anyone, Negro or white, we are in a living hell. That is as real as hell will ever be."

"I know that my Redeemer lives. Thank God I love humanity, complexion doesn't interest me one single a bit."

"My beloved friend, keep your hand in that of the Master, walk daily by His side, so that you may lead others into the realms of true happiness, where a religion of hate, (which poisons both body and soul) will be unknown, having in its place the "Golden Rule" way, which is the "Jesus Way" of life, will reign supreme. Then, we can walk and talk with Jesus momentarily, because we will be attuned to His will and wishes, thus making the Creation story of the world non-debatable as to its reality. God, my beloved friend is infinite the highest embodiment of love. We are finite, surrounded and often filled with hate. We can only understand the infinite as we loose the finite and take on the infinite."

"I do not feel capable of writing a single word of counsel to those dear young people, more than to say that my heart goes out to every one of them, regardless of the fact that I have never seen them and may never do so. I want them to find Jesus, and make Him a daily, hourly, and momently part of themselves. O how I want them to get the fullest measure of happiness and success out of life. I want them to see the Great Creator in the smallest and apparently the most insignificant things about them. How I long for each one to walk and talk with the Great Creator through the things he has created. How I thank God every day that I can walk and talk with Him."

"Our creator is the same and never changes despite the names given Him by people here and in all parts of the world. Even if we gave Him no name at all, He would still be there, within us, waiting to give us good on this earth."

"I love to think of nature as unlimited broadcasting stations, through which God speaks to us every day, every hour and every moment of our lives, if we will only tune in and remain so."

"More and more as we come closer and closer in touch with nature and its teachings are we able to see the Divine and are therefore fitted to interpret correctly the various languages spoken by all forms of nature about us."

"The virgin fertility of our soils and the vast amount of unskilled labor have been more of a curse than a blessing to agriculture. This exhaustive system for cultivation, the destruction of forest, the rapid and almost constant decomposition of organic matter, have made our agricultural problem one requiring more brains than of the North, East or West."

"The climate and the chemical properties of the Earth now and throughout its history seem always to have been optimal for life. For this to have happened by chance is as unlikely as to survive unscathed a drive blindfold through rush hour traffic."

"Challenging the conventional wisdom is the way to make waves in science."

"The first question that Lovelock set out to answer was Dawkins' question about how Gaia "could evolve her global adaptations by the ordinary processes of Darwinian selection acting within one planet." … Lovelock was determined to prove him wrong. … A drastic simplification was required—a scientific model, a set of equations, which could be used to highlight one aspect of how the world works. … Lovelock's experience in systems design helped him. … Lovelock needed a mathematician who could write a paper in language that mathematicians could accept, and Watson is a wizz at math. … The beauty of Daisyworld as a system lies in a combination of positive and negative feedback. … But the crucial point is that at every stage every single daisy is acting in accordance with Dawkins' doctrine of the selfish gene. … The temperature on Daisyworld is regulated without any need for foresight or planning by the daisies. No wonder Lovelock calls Daisyworld "my proudest scientific achievement.""

"The thing I fear worst is that we won't do anything at all. We won't explore geoengineering; we won't cut greenhouse gas pollution in any significant way; we won't change our lives. We will argue about it on TV and write books and make movies and hang banners on the smokestacks of coal plants, and nothing much will change. We will just ride into the dark apocalypse that James Lovelock fears, a future of war and starvation and disease driven by the changes on our superheated planet."

"Lovelock spent months in underground bomb shelters studying how viruses are transmitted and ended up inventing the first aerosol disinfectant. A few years later, he became interested in … cryogenics. … He was the first to understand how cellular structures respond to cold temperatures and developed a means to freeze and thaw animals and their sperm that is still in use today. But Lovelock's most important invention was the electron capture detector (ECD). … Lovelock made a discovery that was even more important than his invention of the ECD. Lovelace hitched a ride … to Antarctica, where he used a jury-rigged ECD to detect the build-up of CFCs …."

"The scientific backgrounds and areas of expertise of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis turned out to be a perfect match. Margulis had no problem answering Lovelock's many questions about the biological origins of atmospheric gases, while Lovelock contributed concepts from chemistry, thermodynamics, and cybernetics to the emerging Gaia theory. Thus the two scientists were able gradually to identify a complex network of feedback loops that—so they hypothesized—bring about the self-regulation of the planetary system [for Earth]."

"One thing being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope you get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don't know it."

"Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. … I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards."

"Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

"Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

"I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change. … The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful."

"In Gaia, there's no such thing as pollution. The rules of the game are that any species that produces something noxious that affects the environment is doomed. Imagine there's some green bug … that decides it would be a neat trick to make chlorine. That bug is not going to succeed. If it doesn't kill itself off, it will certainly kill off its progeny, and destroy the environment around it and have no food to eat."

"Bacteria … have been here for three and a half billion years, and without them we have no chance whatsoever of survival. Humans are something very recent, like the froth on top of a glass of beer."

"Neither Lynn Margulis nor I have ever proposed a teleological hypothesis. Nowhere in our writing do we express the idea that planetary self-regulation is purposeful, or involves planetary foresight or planning by the biota. … Yet we met persistent, almost dogmatic, criticism that our hypothesis is teleological."

"If you were an artist or novelist, or a poet or somebody like that, nobody would think it odd if you worked in your own home. In science there's none of this at all. I'm almost the only independent scientist in Britain. Everybody else works in large institutions, universities, or industrial labs. Why should one expect scientists to work that way?"

"Life has to take charge of its environment and evolve with it."

"Life has to be a planetary phenomenon. You could no more have a partially occupied planet than you could half a cat or half a dog."

"We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet."

"Our planet... consists largely of lumps of fall-out from a star-sized hydrogen bomb...Within our bodies, no less than three million atoms rendered unstable in that event still erupt every minute, releasing a tiny fraction of the energy stored from that fierce fire of long ago."

"If there were a billion people living on the planet, we could do whatever we please. But there are nearly seven billion. At this scale, life as we know it today is not sustainable."

"In the current fashionable denigration of technology, it is easy to forget that nuclear fission is a natural process. If something as intricate as life can assemble by accident, we need not marvel at the fission reactor, a relatively simple contraption, doing likewise."

"The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic. It has engaged the industry and wisdom of ancient and modern geometers to such an extent that it would be superfluous to discuss the problem at length. … Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated."

"Maybe we have become so hung up on looking at the primes from Gauss's and Riemann's perspective that what we are missing is simply a different way to understand these enigmatic numbers. Gauss gave an estimate for the number of primes, Riemann predicted that the guess is at worst the square root of N off its mark, Littlewood showed that you can't do better than this. Maybe there is an alternative viewpoint that no one has found because we have become so culturally attached to the house that Gauss built."

"The revelation that the graph appears to climb so smoothly, even though the primes themselves are so unpredictable, is one of the most miraculous in mathematics and represents one of the high points in the story of the primes. On the back page of his book of logarithms, Gauss recorded the discovery of his formula for the number of primes up to N in terms of the logarithm function. Yet despite the importance of the discovery, Gauss told no one what he had found. The most the world heard of his revelation were the cryptic words, 'You have no idea how much poetry there is in a table of logarithms.'"