Freeman Dyson famous quotes

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

#Wise #Thinking #Mind

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

#Children #School #Views

So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Long #Too Late #Sense Of Humor

In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Writing #Artist #Generations

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

#Together #Looks #Benefits

The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Progress #Facts #Imagine

No matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Memories #World #Information

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

#Destiny #Space #Niche

It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.
-- Freeman Dyson

It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Mindset

There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.
-- Freeman Dyson

#People #Tools #Use

We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Children #Trying #Today

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

#Real #Roots #People

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

#Mean #Fighting #Sacrifice

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

#Ideas #Important #World

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Technology #Simple #Profound

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

#Life #Mother #Art

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. There are no prima donnas in engineering.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Science #Engineering #Ideas

Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Discovery #Firsts #Size

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

#Art #Strong #Long

[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians
-- Freeman Dyson

#Mathematician

The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories.
-- Freeman Dyson

The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Technology #People #Problem

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

#Twenties #Firsts #Physics

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

#Garden #Legacy #Mathematical

Life is nature's way to give mind oportunities it wouldn't otherwise had.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Life #Giving #Mind

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

#Passion #Boys #Thinking

Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Science #Understanding #Mind

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

#Experts #Facts #Honest

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

#Long #Environmental #Global Warming

Computer models of the climate....[are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Dubious #Climate #Input

When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Climate #Gaps #Global Warming

The average ground temperature of the Earth is impossible to measure since most of the Earth is ocean...So this average ground temperature is a fiction.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Ocean #Average #Fiction

There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Doubt #World #Global Warming

Vegetation is really controlling what happens...whereas the emphasis in the climate models has always been on the atmosphere.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Atmosphere #Climate #Global Warming

If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Technology #Gambling #Toys

The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Children #Pain #Childbirth

I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Religion #Mind #Distinction

The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Mystery #Conscious #Unsolved Mysteries

We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!
-- Freeman Dyson

#Ambition #Goal #Ambitious

Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Opportunity #People #Pessimism

Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Technology #Lucky #Needs

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Horse #Cutting #Dark

A model is such a fascinating toy that you fall in love with your creation.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Falling In Love #Love You #Toys

From my childhood it has been my conviction that men would reach the planets in my lifetime . . . this conviction . . . rests on two beliefs, one scientific and one political: (1) there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our present-day science. And we shall only find out what they are if we go out and look for them. (2) it is in the long run essential to the growth of any new and high civilization that small groups of people can escape from their neighbors and from their governments, to go and live as they please in the wilderness.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Running #Men #Civilization

After sketching his program for the scientific revolution that he foresaw, Bacon ends his account with a prayer: "Humbly we pray that this mind may be steadfast in us, and that through these our hands, and the hands of others to whom thou shalt give the same spirit, thou wilt vouchsafe to endow the human family with new mercies". That is still a good prayer for all of us as we begin the twenty-first century.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Prayer #Hands #Giving

The great question for our time is, how to make sure that the continuing scientific revolution brings benefits to everybody rather than widening the gap between rich and poor. To lift up poor countries, and poor people in rich countries, from poverty, to give them a chance of a decent life, technology is not enough. Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Country #Technology #People

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Thinking #People #Purpose

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

#Christian #Europe #Ideas

Climate change is part of the normal order of things, and we know it was happening before humans came.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Order #Climate #Normal

We simply don't know yet what's going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Atmosphere #Global Warming #Carbon

It makes very little sense to believe the output of the climate models.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Believe #Climate #Littles

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

#Thinking #People #Climate

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

#Dream #Tasks #Unpredictable

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

#Education #Years #Twelve

The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.
-- Freeman Dyson

#Mean #Science #Tree

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

#Technology #Office #Racing