Ahmed Zewail Quotes

In all the years with IBM Research, I have especially appreciated the freedom to pursue the activities I found interesting and greatly enjoyed the stimulus, collegial cooperation, frankness, and intellectual generosity of two scientific communities, namely in superconductivity and critical phenomena.

I hate the word 'rendering,' as it equates to 'pouring concrete' on ideas that demand continuing dialog. 'Trade secrets' imply hoarding of knowledge.

We shall have to remove everything that strangles artistic and scientific creativeness.

Good ideas are free - or at least they should be.

At Pixar, good ideas may be cut from a film, but they are never forgotten.

Written in 1895, Alfred Nobel's will endowed prizes for scientific research in chemistry, physics, and medicine. At that time, these fields were narrowly defined, and researchers were often classically trained in only one discipline. In the late 19th century, knowledge of science was not a requisite for success in other walks of life.

Physics is perceived as a lonesome, nerdy kind of enterprise that has very little to do with human feelings and the things that excite people day-to-day about each other. Yet physicists in their own working environment are very social creatures.

At the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, we have long had a tradition of close cooperation between physicists and technicians.

In 1986, I was asked by the then-Dean of Science at the University of British Columbia, Dr. R.C. Miller, Jr., to establish a new interdisciplinary institute, the Biotechnology Laboratory. I decided that it was time for me to start paying back for the thirty years of fun that I had been able to have in research.

Maybe we could think of science as being like a nuclear chain reaction in which people and ideas bounce off each other, and if critical mass is reached, a new field is formed.

I think it's always great to not be the smartest person in the room because I don't want to ever feel like I can't improve upon what I'm doing. I just want to surround myself with people that are better actors than me and better singers and dancers and see what happens.

One of my favorite things about 'Castle' is the fact our writers and producers are so collaborative. They allow us to bring in ideas, and they try to make them happen for us.

The first thing to make clear is that scientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact co-operating as members of a closely knit organization.

I am very grateful for the dedicated work and intellectual contributions of generations of talented postdocs, students and research assistants without whom none of the work from my laboratory would have been possible.

I think of myself as a producer. As a producer and as a showrunner, I already understand what it meant to gather people into a room and step back, to create the boundaries of 'everything's okay' to allow TV writers to go to their craziest places.

I always want to be a part of ensembles. Besides it feeling safer, I think it's a more fun environment to work in. To have a bunch of people collaborating on something, it takes the pressure off of each individual.

I've often heard people say that managing creative people is the hardest thing in the world. 'They're never happy, they drive up the cost of things, blah blah blah.' I just manage people the way I always wanted to be managed. That is, to be creatively challenged, but never to be told what to do.

It's always great when a director is just supportive of what you're doing. They're not so much critiquing you but giving you more ideas, giving you tons of things to work with, making you question your character and making you think about it... and making it seem like everything is limitless. That usually helps a lot.

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.

The sciences are of a sociable disposition, and flourish best in the neighborhood of each other;

For creative tasks, the best approach is often just to hire great people and get out of their way.

Research the leaders in fields related to yours, synthesize their findings, and see how you can apply their hard-won wisdom to your work. Stand on their shoulders, and then make a leap into new territory that is distinctly yours.

I think it's important that science just doesn't stay within narrow boundaries.

Part of the fun of working on 'Beverly Hills, 90210,' for me, was that I got a lot of freedom from our executive producer, Chuck Rosen, to add things, change things. I got a lot of freedom to be creative.