Wolfgang Ketterle Quotes

I decided to be an inventor when I was five. My parents had given me a few various enrichment toys like erector sets, and for some reason I had the idea that if I put things together just the right way, I could create the intended effect.

I love working with technology because it allows me to follow my imagination and to invent new things.

Engineering is not quite as important as imagination.

It's really fun and challenging to build things that have never been built before.

Even when I was young, I would build things with Lego or make 'robots' out of cereal boxes - long before I learned metalwork. The desire to build was always there.

I love the creative process and being able to build something out of nothing.

Nothing in the world can be more exciting than to create something and see it work.

I'm not a designer, I'm an inventor.

I'm an inventor.

As a child, I wanted to know how things worked and to control them. With a friend, I built a number of complicated models that I could control.

Tinkering is something we need to know how to do in order to keep something like the space station running. I am a tinkerer by nature.

I liked to work in a shop down in the basement and invent things and build gadgets.

My training and my inclination is to invent.

You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by things large and small. I wanted to know what made my watch tick, my radio play, and my house stand. I wanted to know who invented the bottle cap and who designed the bridge. I guess from early on I wanted to be an engineer.

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

I learned at an early age that I could make the things that I wanted. That's a very powerful thing to realize as a kid. LEGOs were a key part of that.

Engineering stimulates the mind.

A designer is someone who constructs while he thinks, someone for whom planning and making go together.

I've always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

Studying engineering was natural for me; I was always interested in technology and building things.

When I was a child, Lego came in brick form, you'd buy boxes of random bricks. You used your imagination and your mind in your build.

Inventing is something that has always come very natural to me. As a child, I was always fiddling with things, making contraptions. I'd see something, go home, and try to make something even better.

Problem-solving is essential to engineering. Engineers are constantly on the lookout for a better way to do things.

I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the future - what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can figure out how to build.