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. - Nathan Myhrvold 1 Share Now -
For relatively modest amounts of sulfur dioxide injected into the atmosphere, you could easily cool Earth by 1% or more, if you want. - Nathan Myhrvold 2 Share Now -
The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside. - Nathan Myhrvold 3 Share Now -
Cooking is for chefs. Science informs us and lets us cook while knowing what we are doing, but it is not a replacement for the skills of a chef. - Nathan Myhrvold 4 Share Now -
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. - Nathan Myhrvold 5 Share Now -
Elections, for their part, are typically popularity contests rather than measures of candidates' relative competency or effectiveness. Imagine if scientific truth were determined according to which scientist was most popular. To be successful, scientists would have to be charismatic and attractive - and human knowledge would suffer terribly. - Nathan Myhrvold 6 Share Now -
In politics, religion and other areas of culture, people disagree on the worth of competing ideas. There is no equivalent to the scientific method that can determine in a robust way which ideas match the real world, and which ones can be ruled out. So conflicting ideologies persist indefinitely. - Nathan Myhrvold 7 Share Now -
If you talk about sous-vide, then you have to talk about food safety, and microbiology, and heat. - Nathan Myhrvold 8 Share Now -
One of the things that I love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites. Because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations, and see where they succeeded and where they failed. Use science to, you know, work backwards and say, 'Well, really, what were they thinking?' - Nathan Myhrvold 10 Share Now -
