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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
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
The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe. -- Freeman Dyson
The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. -- Freeman Dyson
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
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
Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science. -- 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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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 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
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
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
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
Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny. -- Freeman Dyson
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
Computer models of the climate ... [are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs. -- Freeman Dyson
Some things go better than you expected, other things go worse, so I'm ... I think the only sensible thing is just to wait and see and what I'm doing when I'm writing books - I'm not doing science so much anymore. -- Freeman Dyson
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
It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear. -- Freeman Dyson
The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories. -- 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
The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered. -- Freeman Dyson
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
It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be
approached without some humor and some bewilderment. -- Freeman Dyson
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word. -- Freeman Dyson
I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce. -- 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
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
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
I have the freedom to do what I want ... bright people to talk to every day. -- 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
The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time. -- Freeman Dyson
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
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
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
The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove. -- Freeman Dyson
There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use. -- 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
In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses. -- 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
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
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
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
A model is such a fascinating toy that you fall in love with your creation. -- 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
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
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
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
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
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
There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures. -- 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
So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh. -- Freeman Dyson
Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent. -- Freeman Dyson
Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding. -- Freeman Dyson
Do not imagine that you have to know everything before you can do anything. My own best work was done when I was most ignorant. -- Freeman Dyson
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
It is better to be wrong than to be vague. -- 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
The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult
problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were
impossible. -- 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
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
The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all. -- Freeman Dyson
Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs. -- 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
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
Life is nature's way to give mind oportunities it wouldn't otherwise had. -- 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
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
To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough. -- 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
my first recommendation to people in charge of science education is, more money for public libraries and museums. Public libraries and museums ought to be as common as schools. -- Freeman Dyson
We simply don't know yet what's going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere. -- 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
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
[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians -- Freeman Dyson
Most of what we see in the universe is dust. -- Freeman Dyson
It makes very little sense to believe the output of the climate models. -- 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
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
Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich. -- 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
Climate change is part of the normal order of things, and we know it was happening before humans came. -- 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
The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible. -- Freeman Dyson
Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams. -- Freeman Dyson
As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. -- 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
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
Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them. -- 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
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
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
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
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 technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people. -- 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
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
Vegetation is really controlling what happens ... whereas the emphasis in the climate models has always been on the atmosphere. -- Freeman Dyson
There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. -- Freeman Dyson
Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes. -- 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
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
We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious! -- Freeman Dyson
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. -- 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 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
A model is done when nothing else can be taken out. -- Freeman Dyson
Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress. -- Freeman Dyson
If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus. -- 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
Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist. -- 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
The universe in some sense must have known that we were coming. -- Freeman Dyson
Committees do harm merely by existing. -- Freeman Dyson
The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes. -- Freeman Dyson
Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths -- Freeman Dyson
If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter. -- Freeman Dyson
CO2 is so beneficial ... it would be crazy to try to reduce it -- Freeman Dyson
Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but also performers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim. -- Freeman Dyson
I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain. -- 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