01 March 2008

TED2008: Day 2 in Quotes

"There have been bangs in the past. There will be bangs in the future. We may live in an endless universe." - Physicist and TED Prize winner Neil Turok

“I have the modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry." - Craig Venter, on his work creating synthetic lifeforms to generate alternative energy sources

"The line between good and evil is movable and it's permeable." - Psychologist Philip Zimbardo

“They’ve lowered the transaction cost of stopping genocide.” - Samantha Power on 1-900-GENOCIDE

“Chris Anderson is a computer-fabricated artifact.” - Paul Rothemund, joking about his work manipulating DNA, as if it were a computer program

"A lot of religious people prefer to be right, rather than compassionate." - Religion scholar and TED prize winner Karen Armstrong

“ 'Temes' [technology-enhanced memes] don’t care about us - they simply want to create more of themselves. Don’t think we created the internet for our own benefit - think about temes spreading for themselves because they must.” - Susan Blackmore

“Beauty and truth do not reside in the object themseles, but rather in the nature of the exchange between the object and the viewer,” -Thomas Krens

“Whoa dude, nice equations!” - Garrett Lisi, the "surfer dude" physicist, introducing his talk by displaying an enormously complex equation on screen. He went on to explain his controversial "theory of everything" without using equations

Posted by June Cohen | Permalink | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)