Freeman Dyson 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?

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

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. Describing John von Neumann's aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm.

Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.

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.

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.

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.

In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.

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.

...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.

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.

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. ... It was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

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

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

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.

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

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

We have these amazing gifts of music and mathematics and painting and Olympic running. I mean, we're the animal that is best of all the animals at long-distance running. Why? It is quite amazing. Superfluous gifts you don't really need to survive.

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

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.

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.

It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

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.

Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.

I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we're going to be outstripped by the machines. But, in my view, this whole field is based on a misconception. I think the brain is analog, whereas the machines are digital. They really are different. So I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.

The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing.

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

The Besicovitch style is architectural. He builds out of simply elements a delicate and complicated architectural structure, usually with a hierarchical plan, and then, when the building is finished, the completed structure leads by simple arguments to an unexpected conclusion. Every Besicovitch proof is a work of art, as carefully constructed as a Bach fugue.

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

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.

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.

The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it's mostly rubbish.

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.

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.