Home > Work >
1 " If men could move out of infancy at half a mile an hour and get up to eighteen thousand miles an hour in one lifetime, well, who was to assume that the walls of the universe were safe from future men? "
― Norman Mailer ,
2 " Since he had, in contrast to his delivery, a big burly squared-off bulk of a body which gave hint of the methodical ruthlessness of more than one Russian bureaucrat, Von Braun’s relatively small voice, darting eyes, and semaphoric presentations of lip made it obvious he was a man of opposites. He "
3 " Was the conquest of space then a potential chariot of Satan, the unique and grand avenue for the new totalitarian? "
4 " It was pure American lunacy. Shoddy technology, the worst kind of American shoddy, was replacing men with machines which did not do the work as well as the men. This crowd of a hundred thirsty reporters could have been handled in three minutes by a couple of countermen at a refreshment stand in a ball park. But there was an insidious desire to replace men everywhere with absurd machines poorly designed and abominably put together; yes, this abominable food vending trailer was the proper opposite number to those smug and complacent VIPs in their stands a half mile away; this was the world they had created, not the spaceship. They knew nothing about the spaceship but its value in the eyes of the world—that was all they had to know. The food vending trailer was their true product. "
5 " Conceive of a sinner who is a Catholic and devout. What complexity in his feeling for the Church, what pieties of observance live between his sins. He has to make such intricate shows of concealment to his damned habits. Yet how simple is the Church’s relation to him. Extreme Unction will deliver his soul from a journey through hell.So it is with physics and engineering. Physics is the church, and engineering the most devout sinner. Physics is the domain of beauty, law, order, awe, and mystery of the purest sort; engineering is partial observance of the laws, and puttering with machines which never work quite as they should work: engineering, like acts of sin, is the process of proceeding boldly into complex and often forbidden matters about which one does not know enough – the laws remain to be elucidated–but the experience of the past and hunger for the taste of the new experience attract one forward. So bridges were built long before men could perform the mathematics of the bending moment. "