One of the commonly accepted narratives of the Internet is that it was built to survive a nuclear attack. This enrages many of its architects, including Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts, who insistently a...
One mark of a great mind is the willingness to change it. We can see that in Leonardo. As he wrestled with his earth and water studies during the early 1500s, he ran into evidence that caused him to r...
On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies Now let’s look at how Einstein articulated all of this in the famous paper that the Annalen der Physik received on June 30, 1905. For all its momentous import,...
Numbers in roman type refer to illustrations in the Photos section; numbers in italics refer to book pages.
Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.49
Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humaniti...
Like a Porsche
Leonardo said so himself. Intellectual passion drives out sensuality, he wrote in one of his notebooks.
Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution
Kant distinguished between two types of truths: (1) analytic propositions, which derive from logic and reason itself rather than from observing the world; for example, all bachelors are unmarried, two...
Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to...
Jobs’s overwrought reaction was understandable. Sculley had once been a father figure to him. So had Mike Markkula. So had Arthur Rock. That week all three had abandoned him.
Jobs was blown away by bitmapping. It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes, he recalled. I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.
Jobs pointed out as we walked in front of his old house.
Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn’t matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was sti...
Jobs did indeed make the Macintosh into a low-cost competitor to the Lisa, one with incompatible software. Making matters worse was that neither machine was compatible with the Apple II. With no one i...
Jobs began to accompany Wozniak to Homebrew meetings, carrying the TV monitor and helping to set things up. The meetings now attracted more than one hundred enthusiasts and had been moved to the audit...
I’ll always remember Apple like any man remembers the first woman he’s fallen in love with. But he was also willing to fight with its management if need be. When someone calls you a thief in public, y...
Ive was a fan of the German industrial designer Dieter Rams, who worked for the electronics firm Braun. Rams preached the gospel of Less but better, Weniger aber besser, and likewise Jobs and Ive wres...
It’s a mark of our political discourse that one of the significant nonpartisan achievements on behalf of American innovation got turned into a punch line because of something that Gore never quite sai...