Last night I was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors. It was a wonderful affair, and it all took place at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in Boston, which I had never visited.<\/p>\n
Coincidentally, our new NYU President, Andrew Hamilton, was also inducted into the NAI last night. So he and I got to hang out for a bit over dinner, something he and I rarely do back at work. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
To most people, it might be the case that a scientist is a scientist. It’s a kind of cultural type, like “athlete” or “musician”.<\/p>\n
But inventors are an intriguing sub-branch of scientist. Whereas science, as a field, is generally focused on discovery — learning things about how the universe around us operates — inventors actively seek to put new things into that universe.<\/p>\n
There is a certain practical mind-set, often accompanied by a privileging of practice over theory. The scientist in general tends to ask “How does reality work?”. The inventor asks “How can I make reality work differently?”<\/p>\n
They are both important questions. But they are not the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night I was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors. It was a wonderful affair, and it all took place at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in Boston, which I had never visited. Coincidentally, our new NYU President, Andrew Hamilton, was also inducted into the NAI last night. So he and … Continue reading “National Academy of Inventors”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18615"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18616,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18615\/revisions\/18616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}