Dyson Freeman Quotes & Sayings

When we look ahead to 2018, we should expect big steps forward in science to come once again from changes in style rather than from marginal improvements in technology. — Freeman Dyson

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. — Freeman Dyson

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

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. — Freeman Dyson

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

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

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. — Freeman Dyson

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

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. — Freeman Dyson

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

Plasma seems to have the kinds of properties one would like for life. It's somewhat like liquid water
unpredictable and thus able to behave in an enormously complex fashion. It could probably carry as much information as DNA does. It has at least the potential for organizing itself in interesting ways. — Freeman Dyson

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

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

The widening gap between technology and human needs can only be filled by ethics. We have seen in the last thirty years many examples of the power of ethics. The worldwide environmental movement, basing its power on ethical persuasion, has scored many victories over industrial wealth and technological arrogance. The most spectacular victory of the environmentalists was the downfall of the nuclear industry in the United States and many other countries, first in the domain of nuclear power and more recently in the domain of weapons. It was the environmental movement that closed down factories for making nuclear weapons in the United States, from plutonium-producing Hanford to warhead-producing Rocky Flats. Ethics can be a force more powerful than politics and economics. — Freeman Dyson

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

Looking back upon this history, I disagree with Galison's conclusion. I do not see critical opalescence as a decisive factor in Einstein's victory. I see Poincare and Einstein equal in their grasp of contemporary technology, equal in their love of philosophical speculation, unequal only in their receptiveness to new ideas. Ideas were the decisive factor. Einstein made the big jump into the world of relativity because he was eager to throw out old ideas and bring in new ones. Poincare hesitated on the brink and never made the big jump. In this instance at least, Kuhn was right. The scientific revolution of 1905 was driven by ideas and not by tools. — Freeman Dyson

Walking the streets of Tokyo with Hawking in his wheelchair ... I felt as if I were taking a walk through Galilee with Jesus Christ [as] crowds of Japanese silently streamed after us, stretching out their hands to touch Hawking's wheelchair ... The crowds had streamed after Einstein [on Einstein's visit to Japan in 1922] as they streamed after Hawking seventy years later ... They showed exquisite choice in their heroes ... Somehow they understood that Einstein and Hawking were not just great scientists, but great human beings. — Freeman Dyson

If the tools are bad, nature's voice is muffled. If the tools are good, nature will give us a clear answer to a clear question. — Freeman Dyson

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

CO2 is so beneficial ... it would be crazy to try to reduce it — Freeman Dyson

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

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

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. — Freeman Dyson

If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus. — Freeman Dyson

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 both 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. — Freeman Dyson

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

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

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

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

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

In Oppenheimer's view, it would be a waste of his precious time, or of mine, to concern ourselves with the details of particular solutions. This was how the philosophy of reductionism led Oppenheimer and Einstein astray. Since the only purpose of physics was to reduce the world of physical phenomena to a finite set of fundamental equations, the study of particular solutions such as black holes was an undesirable distraction from the general goal. Like Hilbert, they were not content to solve particular problems one at a time. They were entranced by the dream of solving all the basic problems at once. And as a result, they failed in their later years to solve any problems at all. — Freeman Dyson

Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent. — Freeman Dyson

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

The average student emerges at the end of the Ph.D. program, already middle-aged, overspecialized, poorly prepared for the world outside, and almost unemployable except in a narrow area of specialization. Large numbers of students for whom the program is inappropriate are trapped in it, because the Ph.D. has become a union card required for entry into the scientific job market. — Freeman Dyson

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

As science has become more abstract and remote from everyday experience, the role of metaphor in our descriptions of the world has become more central. The language that nature speaks, as Galileo long pointed out, is mathematics. The language that ordinary human beings speak, especially those of us who are not fluent in mathematics, is metaphor. Lightman ends his discussion with another metaphor: "We are blind men, imagining what we don't see." That is a good description of theoretical physics. — Freeman Dyson

I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas. — Freeman Dyson

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

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

If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades. — Freeman Dyson

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. — Freeman Dyson

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

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

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

In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over. — Freeman Dyson

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

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

Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious, it ceases to be of absorbing concern to scientists. Almost all the things scientists think and dream about are mysterious. — Freeman Dyson

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

I had the good luck a few years ago to visit the archeological site of Zippori in Israel ... I could see here displayed the Greek culture that Jesus decisively rejected, the same Greek culture that infiltrated the Christian religion soon after his death and has dominated Christianity ever since. — Freeman Dyson

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

Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich. — Freeman Dyson

Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn't mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It's part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least. — Freeman Dyson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The primary difference between the classical layer and the quantum layer is that the classical layer deals with facts and the quantum layer deals with probabilities. In situations where classical laws are valid, we can predict the future by observing the past. In situations where quantum laws are valid, we can observe the past but we cannot predict the future. In the quantum layer, events are unpredictable. — Freeman Dyson

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

Mostly I'm just writing books for the public, and so I try to describe for the public what the choices are, what they might have to expect in the future and so by warning people ahead of time maybe you have an effect. — Freeman Dyson

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

Have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds. — Freeman Dyson

A model is done when nothing else can be taken out. — Freeman Dyson

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

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

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

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

Freeman Dyson said: "It is characteristic of scientific life that it is easy when you have a problem to work on. The hard part is finding your problem. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

Keynes was chief economic adviser to the British government and largely responsible for keeping the British economy afloat at a time when more than half of our gross national product, and all of out foreign exchange, was being spent on the war ... I was lucky to be present at one of his rare appearances in Cambridge, when he gave a lecture with the title "Newton, the Man." ... Four years later he died of heart failure, precipitated by overwork and the hardships of crossing the Atlantic repeatedly in slow propeller-driven airplanes under wartime conditions. — Freeman Dyson

Galison uses the phrase "critical opalescence" to sum up the story of what happened in 1905 when relativity was discovered. Critical opalescence is a strikingly beautiful effect that is seen when water is heated to a temperature of 374 degrees Celsius under high pressure. 374 degrees is called the critical temperature of water. It is the temperature at which water turns continuously into steam without boiling. At the critical temperature and pressure, water and steam are indistinguishable. They are a single fluid, unable to make up its mind whether to be a gas or a liquid. In that critical state, the fluid is continually fluctuating between gas and liquid, and the fluctuations are seen visually as a multicolored sparkling. The sparkling is called opalescence because it is also seen in opal jewels which have a similar multicolored radiance. — Freeman Dyson

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

The reason Dick's physics was so hard for ordinary people to grasp was that he did not use equations. The usual theoretical physics was done since the time of Newton was to begin by writing down some equations and then to work hard calculating solutions of the equations. This was the way Hans and Oppy and Julian Schwinger did physics. Dick just wrote down the solutions out of his head without ever writing down the equations. He had a physical picture of the way things happen, and the picture gave him the solutions directly with a minimum of calculation. It was no wonder that people who had spent their lives solving equations were baffled by him. Their minds were analytical; his was pictorial. — Freeman Dyson

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

The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. — Freeman Dyson

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

Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths — Freeman Dyson

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

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. — Freeman Dyson

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

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

Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist. — Freeman Dyson

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

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

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

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

The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all. — Freeman Dyson

In the history of science it happens not infrequently that a reductionist approach leads to a spectacular success. Frequently the understanding of a complicated system as a whole is impossible without an understanding of its component parts. And sometimes the understanding of a whole field of science is suddenly advanced by the discover of a single basic equation. Thus it happened that the Schrodinger equation in 1926 and the Dirac equation in 1927 brought a miraculous order into the previously mysterious processes of atomic physics. The equations of Erwin Schrodinger and Paul Dirac were triumphs of reductionism. Bewildering complexities of chemistry and physics were reduced to two lines of algebraic symbols. These triumphs were in Oppenheimer's mind when he belittled his own discovery of black holes. Compared with the abstract beauty and simplicity of the Dirac equation, the black hole solution seemed to him ugly, complicated, and lacking in fundamental significance. — Freeman Dyson

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

Most of what we see in the universe is dust. — Freeman Dyson

Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes. — Freeman Dyson

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

Most of the crackpot 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. When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer himself it will be only half-understood; to everybody else it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope. — Freeman Dyson

The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible. — Freeman Dyson

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

Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams. — Freeman Dyson