Freeman Dyson Quotes

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.

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.

Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.

You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too.

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.

There are three reasons, . . . apart from scientific considerations, mankind needs to travel in space. The first . . . is garbage disposal; we need to transfer industrial processes into space so that the earth may remain a green and pleasant place for our grandchildren to live in. The second . . . to escape material impoverishment: the resources of this planet are finite, and we shall not forego forever the abundance of solar energy and minerals and living space that are spread out all around us. The third . . . our spiritual need for an open frontier.

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.

To me, mathematics is like playing the violin. Some people can do it - others can't. If you don't have it, then there's no point in pretending.

Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.

The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.

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.

The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility.

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.

I think the biggest misconception about mathematics is that everybody has to learn it. That seems to be a complete mistake. All the time worrying about pushing the children and getting them to be mathematically literate and all that stuff. It's terribly hard on the kids. It's also hard on the teachers. And I think it's totally useless. To me, mathematics is like playing the violin. Some people can do it - others can't. If you don't have it, then there's no point in pretending.

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.

Mathematics is really an art, not a science. You could say science also is an art. So I would say the difference is something you can't really describe - you can only recognize. You hear somebody playing the violin, and it was Fritz Kreisler or it was somebody else, and you can tell the difference. It is so in almost every art. We just don't understand why it is that there are just a few people who are just completely off the scale and the rest of them are just mediocre. And we don't know why. But I say it's certainly true of mathematics.

I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence.

The most revolutionary aspect of technology is its mobility. Anybody can learn it. It jumps easily over barriers of race and language. ... The new technology of microchips and computer software is learned much faster than the old technology of coal and iron. It took three generations of misery for the older industrial countries to master the technology of coal and iron. The new industrial countries of East Asia, South Korea, and Singapore and Taiwan, mastered the new technology and made the jump from poverty to wealth in a single generation.

Nothing is boring if you look at carefully.

That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.

Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute.

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

The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.

The key to having an interesting life is to always say "yes" to anything crazy.

Well germ warfare of course exists. There have been on a small scale... There have been, of course, a few people who got killed with anthrax right here in Princeton.

I grew up in England at a time when England was winning Nobel Prizes right and left. I mean it was amazing how many Nobel Prizes England was winning in chemistry and physics and biology and all the sciences and at that time the teaching of science in the schools was really lousy.

I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.

All the time worrying about pushing the children and getting them to be mathematically literate and all that stuff. It's terribly hard on the kids. It's also hard on the teachers. And I think it's totally useless.

It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.

Science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly. I mean World War I was a horrible war and it was mostly the fault of science, so that was in a way a very bad time for science, but on the other hand we were winning all these Nobel Prizes.

Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.

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

Of course, the English countryside is completely artificial. It was naturally a forest; they chopped down the trees and made it into what it is now: really a beautiful country.

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.

I have the freedom to do what I want... bright people to talk to every day.

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.

As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.

It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

That's what I learned from World War II. Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

In the long run, the only solution I see to the problem of diversity is the expansion of mankind into the universe by means of green technology... Green technology means we do not live in cans but adapt our plants and our animals and ourselves to live wild in the universe as we find it... When life invades a new habitat, she never moves with a single species. She comes with a variety of species, and as soon as she is established, her species spread and diversify further. Our spread through the galaxy will follow her ancient pattern.

Of course, long-distance running has to do with the fact that we're hunters.

When World War II came along, which was when I was a teenager, we all expected we would have anthrax bombs and this kind of stuff. We thought it would be a biological war. Fortunately it wasn't and, but it's because the danger is still there and by some miracle we escaped all that, so you never can tell what it going to happen, but biology certainly could be even worse than physics and chemistry.

I mean science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly.

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.

When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in muddled, incomplete and confusing form. ... For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.

Some of my friends like to keep science and religion together, but I certainly like to keep them separate.

Science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practise it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. ... Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours.

It's us that's really amazing.