Top 100 Freeman Dyson Quotes
#1. The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do.
Freeman Dyson
#2. For many scientists less divinely gifted than Einstein,the chief reward for being a scientist is not the power and the money but the chance of catching a glimpse of the transcendent beauty of nature.
Freeman Dyson
#3. So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh.
Freeman Dyson
#4. The debacle of European pacifism has at least one clear lesson to teach us: pacifists, if they are to be effective in the modern world, must be as wholehearted and as brave as Gandhi.
Freeman Dyson
#5. The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.
Freeman Dyson
#6. I grew up in England and we spent most of the time on Latin and Greek and very little on science, and I think that was good because it meant we didn't get turned off. It was ... Science was something we did for fun and not because we had to.
Freeman Dyson
#7. Climate change is part of the normal order of things, and we know it was happening before humans came.
Freeman Dyson
#8. There is nothing so big nor so crazy that one out of a million technological societies may not feel itself driven to do, provided it is physically possible.
Freeman Dyson
#9. It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values.
Freeman Dyson
#10. What the world needs is a small, compact, flexible fusion technology that could make electricity where and when it is needed. The existing fusion program is leading to a huge source of centralized power, at a price that nobody except a government can afford.
Freeman Dyson
#11. If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus.
Freeman Dyson
#12. Intelligence may indeed be a benign influence creating isolated groups of philosopher-kings far apart in the heavens ... On the other hand, intelligence may be a cancer of purposeless technological exploitation, sweeping across a galaxy as irresistibly as it has swept across our own planet.
Freeman Dyson
#13. Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.
Freeman Dyson
#14. Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.
Freeman Dyson
#15. There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global.
Freeman Dyson
#16. Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs.
Freeman Dyson
#17. The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.
Freeman Dyson
#19. Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
Freeman Dyson
#20. It makes very little sense to believe the output of the climate models.
Freeman Dyson
#21. We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.
Freeman Dyson
#22. The computer models are very good at solving equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly.
Freeman Dyson
#23. The nonliving universe is as diverse and as dynamic as the living universe, and is also dominated by patterns of organization that are not yet understood.
Freeman Dyson
#24. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines.
Freeman Dyson
#25. The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires.
Freeman Dyson
#26. If we want to go to space with humans, that's for fun not for science. Human adventures in space are just sporting events.
Freeman Dyson
#27. Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word.
Freeman Dyson
#28. A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.
Freeman Dyson
#29. The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all. There's no reason why one should be scared.
Freeman Dyson
#30. One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.
Freeman Dyson
#31. The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore's just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.
Freeman Dyson
#32. I think the fact that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and talked about anthrax bombs probably helped because at least we ... people had the understanding before the war began that's something we didn't want to get into.
Freeman Dyson
#33. We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!
Freeman Dyson
#34. For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created.
Freeman Dyson
#35. It's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe.
Freeman Dyson
#36. The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm.
Freeman Dyson
#37. We simply don't know yet what's going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere.
Freeman Dyson
#38. I don't believe in technological determinism, especially not in biology and medicine. We have strong laws to keep doctors from monkeying around with humans that will remain in place. It's simply not true that everything that is technologically possible gets done.
Freeman Dyson
#39. I have the freedom to do what I want ... bright people to talk to every day.
Freeman Dyson
#40. Unfortunately, things are different in climate science because the arguments have become heavily politicised. To say that the dogmas are wrong has become politically incorrect.
Freeman Dyson
#41. The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes - as well as humans. It is not important that we didn't actually finish the human sequence yet.
Freeman Dyson
#42. The idea that God may be approached and understood through intellectual analysis is uniquely Christian ... It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind.
Freeman Dyson
#43. Most of the papers which are submitted to the Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published.
Freeman Dyson
#44. I like people who are working on practical things and who are working in teams. It's not so important to get the glory. It's much more important to get something that works. It's a better way to live.
Freeman Dyson
#45. Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but also performers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim.
Freeman Dyson
#46. The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories.
Freeman Dyson
#47. The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.
Freeman Dyson
#48. The analogies between science and art are very good as long as you are talking about the creation and the performance. The creation is certainly very analogous. The aesthetic pleasure of the craftsmanship of performance is also very strong in science.
Freeman Dyson
#49. Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.
Freeman Dyson
#51. The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.
Freeman Dyson
#52. If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter.
Freeman Dyson
#53. There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.
Freeman Dyson
#54. Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.
Freeman Dyson
#55. Computer models of the climate ... [are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs.
Freeman Dyson
#56. Sometimes we talked about the nature of the human soul and about the Cosmic Unity of souls that I had believed in so firmly when I was 15 years old. My mother did not like the phrase Cosmic Unity. It was too pretentious. She preferred to call it a world soul.
Freeman Dyson
#57. As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so
Freeman Dyson
#58. The international community of scientists may help to abolish war by setting an example to the world of practical cooperation extending across barriers of nationality, language, and culture.
Freeman Dyson
#59. One of the memorable moments of my life was when Willard Libby came to Princeton with a little jar full of crystals of barium xenate. A stable compound, looking like common salt, but much heavier. This was the magic of chemistry, to see xenon trapped into a crystal.
Freeman Dyson
#60. The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.
Freeman Dyson
#61. The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.
Freeman Dyson
#62. Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their normal business of selling and repairing bicycles.
Freeman Dyson
#63. The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility.
Freeman Dyson
#64. Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.
Freeman Dyson
#65. The third quality that is needed for a scientist to become a public icon is wisdom. Besides being a famous joker and a famous genius, Feynman was also a wise human being whose answers to serious questions made sense.
Freeman Dyson
#66. You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?
Freeman Dyson
#67. The seeds from Ramanujan's garden have been blowing on the wind and have been sprouting all over the landscape.
[On the stimulating effects of Ramanujan's mathematical legacy.]
Freeman Dyson
#68. I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.
Freeman Dyson
#69. If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed. I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination.
Freeman Dyson
#70. Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.
Freeman Dyson
#71. A country facing an aggressive enemy must decide either to be prepared to fight effectively or to follow the path of nonviolence to the end. In either case, the decision must be wholehearted and the consequences must be accepted.
Freeman Dyson
#72. A model is such a fascinating toy that you fall in love with your creation.
Freeman Dyson
#73. Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
Freeman Dyson
#74. The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.
Freeman Dyson
#75. Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.
Freeman Dyson
#76. If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.
Freeman Dyson
#77. Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.
Freeman Dyson
#78. The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.
Freeman Dyson
#79. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.
Freeman Dyson
#80. I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.
Freeman Dyson
#81. A model is done when nothing else can be taken out.
Freeman Dyson
#82. Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths
Freeman Dyson
#83. The world of science and the world of literature have much in common. Each is an international club, helping to tie mankind together across barriers of nationality, race and language. I have been doubly lucky, being accepted as a member of both.
Freeman Dyson
#84. [John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians
Freeman Dyson
#85. A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.
Freeman Dyson
#86. The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.
Freeman Dyson
#87. We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods.
Freeman Dyson
#88. It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.
Freeman Dyson
#89. Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.
Freeman Dyson
#90. I belonged to a small minority of boys who were lacking in physical strength and athletic prowess ... We found our refuge in science ... We learned that science is a revenge of victims against oppressors, that science is a territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred.
Freeman Dyson
#91. I don't know, but I think it's quite possible that the more science you teach kids in school the more it turns them off, so I don't know. I mean you never can tell which way it will go.
Freeman Dyson
#92. I once attended a meeting of historians at which the disciples of Kuhn were presenting an extreme and exaggerated version of his views. Kuhn interrupted them by shouting from the back of the hall with overwhelming volume, "One thing you people need to understand: I am not a Kuhnian.
Freeman Dyson
#93. In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.
Freeman Dyson
#94. I don't think of myself predicting things. I'm expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it's a question of how badly people want them to.
Freeman Dyson
#95. It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true
Freeman Dyson
#96. For me too, the periodic table was a passion ... As a boy, I stood in front of the display for hours, thinking how wonderful it was that each of those metal foils and jars of gas had its own distinct personality.
Freeman Dyson
#97. We do not know how much of the environmental change is due to human activities and how much [is due] to long-term natural processes over which we have no control.
Freeman Dyson
#98. Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.
Freeman Dyson
#99. Vegetation is really controlling what happens ... whereas the emphasis in the climate models has always been on the atmosphere.
Freeman Dyson
#100. As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.
Freeman Dyson
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