Edward M. Lerner Quotes

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist.

I'm an engineer. I'm a techie, really.

When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn't pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did.

I'm very much a technical person.

In 1989, I retired from Bell Laboratories to become a full-time writer. Not that I didn't enjoy my engineering career, but rather I liked being a novelist just a bit better.

My mom is a science teacher in high school, and one of my brothers works in optics at Bell Labs, and so I was always surrounded by it.

I was not going to be an actor. I was an engineer in physics. That's what I did: I graduated with a physics degree, and I had become a little bit distressed that I'd have to work for somebody - anybody! And I thought, "I'm not going to make a mark on anything. If I can't express myself, then I don't know what the heck I'm going to do with this life." I think it was just one of those germs that said, "No, no, no, you've got to say things. You've got to tell people things. You've got to express your opinion in this life, because that's how you started."

I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist. These are scientists who are making the future in their laboratories.

Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.

It's [programming] the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation.

I considered law and math. My Dad was a lawyer. I think though I would have ended up in physics if I didn't end up in computer science.

No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.

Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.

The centre of gravity of any cylinder is the point of bisection of the axis.

To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope.

...The entire preoccupation of the physicist is with things that contain within themselves a principle of movement and rest.

The training one receives when one becomes a technician, like a data scientist - we get trained in mathematics or computer science or statistics - is entirely separated from a discussion of ethics.

While the United States has been busy creating lawyers, we have been busier creating engineers.

Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity.

I quit law in 1988 to start writing, and it took me 17 years from that point to get a book contract. I guess you can say I was on the slow train.

What of course I would like to be writing is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Coloured Quarks. But we can't all be physicists.

Similarly for marking exercises, quantitative exercises, maybe not so much in mathematics, but certainly problem sets in physics, chemistry, and engineering and things like that where answers and methods are clear cut, absolutely. I would like to see that done online.