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Reinout_Willem_van_Bemmelen

Validity of Hypothesis

“The functional validity of a working hypothesis is not a priori certain, because often it is initially based on intuition. However, logical deductions from such a hypothesis provide expectations (so-called prognoses) as to the circumstances under which certain phenomena will appear in nature. Such a postulate or working hypothesis can then be substantiated by additional observations ... The author calls such expectations and additional observations the prognosis-diagnosis method of research. Prognosis in science may be termed the prediction of the future finding of corroborative evidence of certain features or phenomena (diagnostic facts). This method of scientific research builds up and extends the relations between the subject and the object by means of a circuit of inductions and deductions.”
  • Source: Reinout Willem van Bemmelen. In 'The Scientific Character of Geology', The Journal of Geology (Jul 1961), 69, No. 4, 454-5.

Bible_Verses

Tower Of Babel (Genesis 11:4-6)

(4) “And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”
(5) “And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.”
(6) “And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”

House On Sand (Matthew 7:24-27)

(24) “Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:”
(25) “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.”
(26) “And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:”
(27) “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.'

Robert_N_Britcher

Errors in Tests and Simulators

“The simulator software had to be tested as thoroughly as the software it was built to test. A fault in the simulator would cause the worst kind of problem, what computer analysts call a Byzantine failure. Byzantine failures are like traitors in a family. There is always a risk this will happen.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 61.

Fault Layers

"Layer upon layer of programs will build on faults as they build on features.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 134.

Requirements Testing

“Requirements testing is a subtle way of treating a nonlinear, unpredictable system as if it were a discrete symbol like a number or a word. The potential and the actual become muddled. Requirements are natural language statements, peppered in places with arithmetic. These are discrete and usually quite vague representations of the system as it might become. But the truth is that two teams writing requirements for the same system would describe them differently, and neither would get it quite right, simply because 'right' cannot be known until the system is built. ... Requirements testing is a little like trying to reduce crime in England by running a test for each line in the Magna Carta. In practice, rhetoric replaces the scientific method. As with mathematical proofs, the quest for 'true or not false' soon turns into a party - a not very cordial party - marked by endless debate over whether this sentence or that sentence has been verified by this moment of behavior or that.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 157.

Fred_Brooks

Specification Hard

“Even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.”
  • Source: Brooks Jr., F. P. (1995). The Mythical Man-Month - Essays on Software Engineering (Anniversary Edition) | 1975/1995 (Anniv.). Boston. MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0201835959. Chapter 16, page 195.

Grow Not Build Software

“Grow, not build software... The building metaphor has outlived its usefulness.”
  • Source: Brooks Jr., F. P. (1995). The Mythical Man-Month - Essays on Software Engineering (Anniversary Edition) | 1975/1995 (Anniv.). Boston. MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0201835959. Chapter 16, page 200.

Great Designers

“A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built by multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers.”
  • Source: Brooks Jr., F. P. (1995). The Mythical Man-Month - Essays on Software Engineering (Anniversary Edition) | 1975/1995 (Anniv.). Boston. MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0201835959. Chapter 16, page 202.

Programmer Poetry

“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.”
  • Source: Brooks Jr., F. P. (1995). The Mythical Man-Month - Essays on Software Engineering (Anniversary Edition) | 1975/1995 (Anniv.). Boston. MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0201835959. Chapter 1, page 7.

Team Design

“Team design is increasingly the norm for complex artifacts. Teams are often geographically dispersed. Designers are increasingly divorced from both use and implementation — typically they no longer can build with their own hands the things they design. All kinds of designs are now captured in computer models instead of drawings. Formal design processes are increasingly taught, and they are often mandated by employers.”
  • Source: Brooks Jr., F. P. (2010). The Design of Design. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 978-0-201-36298-5. Preface.

Peter_Drucker

Functioning Society or Tyranny

“We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.”
  • Source: Drucker, P. F. (1942). The Future of Industrial Man. Page 96. DOI: 10.4324/9781315132143.

Albert_Einstein

Art Science Life

“I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman’s irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.”
  • Source: Words spoken by Albert Einstein in an address to The Physical Society in Berlin in 1918 to honor Max Planck’s 60th birthday, Transcribed into the book 'Essays in Science' in the chapter 'Principles of Research' written by Albert Einstein and translated to english by Alan Harris. Published in 1934 by The Philosophical Library, New York, NY.

David_Epstein

Knowledge Bridge

“Work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”. Published 2019 by Riverhead Books. Chapter 12, page 282. ISBN 978-0735214484.

Eugene_Grace

Great Engineers

“Thousands of engineers can design bridges, calculate strains and stresses, and draw up specifications for machines, but the great engineer is the man who can tell whether the bridge or the machine should be built at all, where it should be built, and when.”

Initiative

“The man who has in him the stuff of which success is made is never afraid to accept responsibilities; then, when he gets responsibility, he doesn't regard it lightly; nor does he ever seek to shirk the consequences or attempt to blame anyone else when anything goes wrong. My chief difficulty in building up our huge organization is to find men able and willing to take and discharge responsibilities. So many men can only go to the point of doing routine duties; when given tasks requiring initiative and readiness to shoulder responsibility, they continually run to the boss to get instructions. I am constantly on the lookout for fellows who are not afraid to use their own judgment, and, although they may make quite a few mistakes, yet they at least show executive potentialities... Of course there must be more than willingness to accept responsibility and to exercise initiative; willingness must be accompanied by ability, knowledge, and the judgment which can come only from having thoroughly mastered one's business.”

Robert_M_Graham

Wright Brothers Construction

“We tend to go on for years, with tremendous investments to find that the system, which was not well understood to start with, does not work as anticipated. We build systems like the Wright brothers built airplanes — build the whole thing, push it off the cliff, let it crash, and start over again.”

Yuval_Noah_Harari

Information Reality

“Information is increasingly seen by many philosophers and biologists, and even by some physicists, as the most basic building block of reality, more elementary than matter and energy.”
  • Source: Yuval Noah Harari in the book “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI”. Published 2024 by Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Page 3. ISBN: 9780593734247 (ebook).
  • Notes: While the “it from bit” position is becoming more acceptable in physics, most physicists still doubt or reject it and believe that matter and energy are the fundamental building blocks of nature, while information is a derived phenomenon.
  • See Also:
    • Nick Bostrom, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?,” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 243–55, www.jstor.org/​stable/​3542867.
    • David J. Chalmers, “Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy” (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022).
    • Archibald Wheeler’s influential notion of “it from bit”: John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” Proceedings III International Symposium on Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Tokyo, 1989), 354–68;
    • Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen, eds., “Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics” (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2014);
    • Erik Verlinde, “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” Journal of High Energy Physics 4 (2011): 1–27.
    • Yuval_Noah_Harari_quotes
    • Yuval_Noah_Harari_quotes/Information_Reality

Robert_Heinlein

Specialization

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”.
  • Source: Written by Robert A. Heinlein in the book “Time Enough for Love”, published in 1973 by Putnam's Sons, ISBN: 0-399-11151-4. ISBN: 9781101503072 (ebook). Page 256 (Kindle edition).

David_Kipping

Nature Computation

“It is important to distinguish between testing whether the universe is built upon the principles of computation but is not a simulation versus testing where the universe is indeed a simulation on someone's computer. Those are different to each other. It is quite possible that the laws of computation are somehow embedded within nature and yet everything we see around us is not a simulation.”
  • Source: David Kipping from the YouTube “Why You're Probably Not a Simulation”, posted 2020-09-04 in the channel ‘Cool Worlds’. Video offset 11:15. Online at https://youtu.be/HA5YuwvJkpQ (2025).

William_S_Knudsen

Factory

“If you wanted to build a factory, the thing to do was to make a layout of your machinery, and the flow of material, and then build a building around it.”
  • Source: Words spoken by William S. Knudsen as recorded in the book “Knudsen: A Biography” written by Norman Beasley. Published in 2017 by Papamoa Press. Originally published in 1947. Page 54. Online at https://www.google.com/books/edition/Knudsen/OS5BDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1 (retrieved 2024-05-19). Also recorded in the book “Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II”. Written by Arthur Herman. Published in 2012 by Random House, New York, NY. ISBN: 9780679604631 (ebook). Page 22.

Kenneth_W_Kolence

Software Engineer

“There are people who call themselves software engineers, and who build software systems that other people trust their lives to that software. So a great deal of progress has really been made since 1962 (when I first began considering myself as a software engineer) and in that respect toward what may be considered as a valid engineering capability. ... Using the term [Software Engineering] ... actually did, for the first time, provide programmers with a more professional description of what they were trying to do. In my opinion, that was a very good thing.”

Alan_Perlis

Software Engineering Competence

“It is a fact that there are software engineers around today who are quite competent. There are systems in many places which are quite stable and which provide magnificent service. It is also the case that there are large numbers of efforts, containing large numbers of programs and programmers, which have no software engineers on them, that is that people function as though they did not know how to build software.”
  • Note: Un-indexed continuation of quote: “I have a number of questions: 1. Is it possible to have software engineers in the numbers in which we need them, without formal software engineering education? 2. Is software engineering the same as Computer Science? 3. Is software engineering best provided by baccalaureate programs in universities? Or by adult education courses? Or by two year courses following the standard grade school education? 4. Do the people educated in these programs have a growing and future role in our society? 5. Will they be useful enough in a firm or government or university, and is their value such that they can distribute their talents in other activities, or must they always remain programmers? 6. What curriculum do we have in mind for software engineers, regardless of what level we choose to educate them? 7. Is software engineering really different from what we now call systems engineering?”

Antoine_de_Saint-Exupéry

Meaning of Life

“Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something moulded. These prison walls that this age of trade has built up round us, we can break down. We can still run free, call to our comrades, and marvel to hear once more, in response to our call, the pathetic chant of the human voice.”
  • Source: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, from page 48 of the book entitled "Wind, Sand and Stars". Translated from French by Lewis Galantiere. Published in 1939 by Reynal and Hitchcock. Retrieved 2018-04-22 from https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.264850 .

Patrick_Vlaskovits

Faster Horse

“However, even if Ford didn’t verbalize his thoughts on customers’ ostensible inability to communicate their unmet needs for innovative products — history indicates that Henry Ford most certainly did think along those lines... Henry Ford froze the design of the Model T... Ford had no compelling reason to innovate in any other sphere other than cost and price reduction... But everything changed with the onset of the innovations introduced by General Motors in the 1920s, which took the direct opposite of Henry Ford’s tack of “Any color … so long as it is black” and is best summed up by Alfred Sloan’s consumer-research driven “A Car for Every Purse and Purpose”... In 1921, the Ford Motor Company sold about 2/3 of all the cars built in the U.S. By 1926, this share had fallen to approximately 1/3. And in 1927, when Ford belatedly responded (at tremendous financial cost and internal strife) to changes in the market’s tastes and competitive innovation by shutting down production temporarily to re-tool his factories and bring the Model A to the market, that percentage fell to about 15%... Yes, some customers in certain types of businesses are quite capable of verbalizing precisely what sort of innovative product one could build and sell them. And of course, customers in other types of businesses are wholly incapable of verbalizing, with any sort of fidelity whatsoever, what they need and why they need it. An innovator should have understanding of one’s customers and their problems via empirical, observational, anecdotal methods or even intuition. They should also feel free to ignore customers’ inputs. Because by now it should be clear that Ford’s adherence to his vision of the mass-market car and how to materialize that vision was instrumental in both his early success in growing Ford Motor Company as well as his later failure to respond in a timely and effective manner to rapid innovation in the marketplace.”'

Eugene_Wigner

No Definite Evidence

“[F. Werner, while a student in Princeton,] came to me and expressed his bewilderment with the fact that we make a rather narrow selection when choosing the data on which we test our theories. ‘How do we know that, if we made a theory which focuses its attention on phenomena we disregard and disregards some of the phenomena now commanding our attention, that we could not build another theory which has little in common with the present one but which, nevertheless, explains just as many phenomena as the present theory?' It has to be admitted that we have no definite evidence that there is no such theory.”
  • Source: Eugene Paul Wigner, In 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,' Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics (Feb 1960), 13, No. 1 (February 1960). Collected in Eugene Paul Wigner, A.S. Wightman (ed.), Jagdish Mehra (ed.), The Collected Works of Eugene Paul Wigner (1955), Vol. 6, 535.

Stephen_Wolfram

Foundational Math Problem

“Here's the foundational problem. The mathematics you need is completely unknown. We're trying to build it, but here's how it works. If you study calculus, you'll study univariant calculus, calculus of one variable. You'll study multivariant calculus, calculus where there's variables x, y, z, and so on. What we need is calculus where there are fractional number of variables, and nobody has ever figured that out. Nobody has even tried to study that. When you look at the kind of geometry that emerges from these hypergraphs and things you end up needing to know about things like calculus in 3.1 dimensions. That's simply a mathematical structure that hasn't been built. We're in the process of building it, but it is a fairly heavy lift. That's a deep, foundational piece of mathematics that has to be built...”
  • Source: Spoken by Stephen Wolfram in a video interview with Brian Keating recorded in the YouTube video ‘What is Time? Stephen Wolfram’s Groundbreaking New Theory’ published on channel ‘Dr. Brian Keating’ on 2024-12-02. Video offset 1:32:08. Online at https://youtu.be/c-RO3vM10Ok?si=i-XspeEtzqA3jPl9 retrieved 2024.

Edward_Yourdon

Prototyping Analysis Design

“Everyone knows the benefits of building a prototype for an end user who is unsure of his or her requirements, but prototyping cannot eliminate the need for formal analysis and design work on large, complex projects.”
  • Source: Edward Yourdon in the book “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer”. Published in 1992 by Prentice Hall. ISBN: 0-13-203670-3. Chapter 2, section 2.4, page 30.