Top 55 Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

Raw lobster tail, freeze dried, is amazing.

Records were replaced by CDs, and lead type died in favor of computerized fonts. However, each had a 100-year ride of popularity, so you can’t feel too bad for them.

The dilemma for early 21st century journalism is this: Who will pay for the news?

Most visions of extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional extraterrestrials of ‘Star Trek’ or a hundred other space operas are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place are mostly WASPish men.

Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.

Three things about water affect almost all of cooking. First are the hydrogen bonds, which is why it has an incredibly high boiling point. Another is that it’s a polar molecule, so that it dissolves a lot of things, and there are things that won’t mix with it. And then there’s how much energy it takes to heat water.

Efficiency in government is a more elusive concept than efficiency in the private economy, which may be measured relatively easily as output per units of input. What is the government’s ‘output?’

We pay for content that we like, and we like the content we pay for. It’s a lot more satisfying to pay $7.50 for Steven Spielberg’s next epic than it is to watch my home movies for free. Even for me.

Another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie ‘Contact,’ which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way.

We collectively have a special place in our heart for the manned space flight program – Apollo nostalgia is one element, but that is only part of it. American culture worships explorers – look at the fame of Lewis and Clark, for example. The American people want to think of themselves as supporting exploration.

If we could create invention capitalism, that would be a helluva legacy, that would be a helluva thing to do… We could actually turbocharge the rate at which the world invents things.

Don’t let the secret recipe die with the inventor.

Chefs think about what it’s like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works.

The Internet is the ultimate vanity-publishing medium, and therefore, the ultimate place for those of us who like to watch. The Internet can reach an audience at lower cost than any medium before it.

Words can hurt you. In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle ways.

Microsoft, Apple, Facebook all bought huge patent portfolios to further their strategic game. They’re doing what I’m doing!

One of the greatest things that Apple and Jobs were very good at doing was daring to do the very different thing. It’s what I did with my cookbook, frankly.

It’s impossible that we’re alone in the universe. Every time we think we’re more special than others, we’re proven wrong.

I was good at math and science, and I got lots of degrees in lots of things, but in a parallel universe, I probably became a chef.

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn’t give a damn about patents – they copied each other willy-nilly.

Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that’s what it is. It’s horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don’t get any erosion, and you don’t see any dinosaurs.

Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender.

People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on a celestial scale. Fortunately, political and religious leaders stopped barbecuing astronomers for saying so, turning their spits with human-rights activists instead.

Our goal was to show people a vision of food they hadn’t seen before. So, I had this idea of… let’s cut all these things in half, and show a picture of the food in the pan, in the oven.

It is better to predict dramatic things that don’t happen than boring things that do.

If people don’t get paid for their inventions, that’s not a good thing. In the case of many patents, there are people who aren’t in a position to take them to the next level. If you don’t enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you.

Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less!

Researchers who examined the voting records of wine judges found that 90 percent of the time they give inconsistent ratings to a particular wine when they judge it on multiple occasions.

Software-industry battles are fought by highly paid and out-of-shape nerds furiously pounding computer keyboards while they guzzle diet Coke. The stakes aren’t very dramatic. Life? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness? Nope, it’s about stock options.

It’s very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable – broadly, that’s a good thing – in the case of patents, many that own them aren’t in a good position to take the next step.

There’s no way I’m going to stand up for bad ingredients. We love seasonal ingredients. It’s a false dichotomy to say that modern cooking is at odds with that, but some people want to have a great ingredient and no technique.

If people don’t find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important.

The depressing thing about battery technology is that it gets better, but it gets better slowly. There are a whole bunch of problems in materials science and chemistry that come in trying to make existing batteries better.

If you talk about sous-vide, then you have to talk about food safety, and microbiology, and heat.

Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat – and who perform other acts of derring-do. This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors.

Regardless of how it’s done, transaction costs will continue to plummet as computers get more powerful. Low transaction costs are a wonderful thing if you’re in the transaction business. They’re wonderful for consumers too, making it cheaper and easier to buy things and creating new things to buy.

The magic words ‘on the Internet,’ if inserted into nearly any sentence, seem to protect it from normal critical scrutiny.

Technological ‘revolutions’ don’t really overthrow anything – they simply append a new and dynamic market to that which went before.

Risk is the sort of word that is easy to discuss upfront but tough to handle when it comes time to pay the piper. There will always be some who wimp out and second-guess when the pain hits, but that is a childish reaction.

Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock.

The best value for money in cooking equipment, in my mind, is first a digital scale and digital thermometer. They’re both about $20. They help you cook so much more accurately that they’re both enormously valuable.

One of the ugly secrets of the renewable-energy industry is that its products make no economic sense unless they are highly subsidized.

There is a one-in-300 chance that Earth will be struck on March 16, 2880, by an asteroid large enough to destroy civilization and possibly cause the extinction of the human race. But, on the bright side, Prince could re-release his hit song with the new refrain ‘We’re gonna party like its twenty-eight seventy-nine.’

An efficient government is dangerous in the hands of the wrong man. Sadly, the right sort of man never seems interested in the job.

We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it.

The idea behind a dish – the delight and the surprise – makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn’t just ‘Here’s the facts – boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.’ It’s how you tell it.

Intellectual Ventures is a company that invests in invention.

I think you would find almost anyone who stands up for their patent rights has been called a patent troll.

Pressure cookers are relatively inexpensive, they’re in every kitchen store, your grandma probably had one, but a lot of people don’t. A pressure cooker is interesting because by pressurizing the vessel, you’re able to cook much hotter than the boiling point of water, and still have water be present.

Why pay a fee for Internet content when a million free sites are just a click away? There’s no incentive until people are too addicted to the Net to turn off their computers, yet are bored with what’s available.