Alec Nevala-Lee

Thoughts on art, creativity, and the writing life.

Quote of the Day

with one comment

You can’t possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It’s a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we’ve been building them for 100 years, it’s very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works—it’s even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.

Freeman Dyson, in a Wired interview with Stewart Brand

Written by nevalalee

May 18, 2011 at 8:01 am

One Response

Subscribe to comments with RSS.

  1. A better example, I think, is zippers.

    Drew

    May 18, 2011 at 2:55 pm


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: