"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"
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Freeman Dyson quotes (page 11 of 12)
228 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Dropping of the atomic bomb was the main subject of conversation for many years and so people had very strong feelings about it on both sides and people who thought it was the greatest thing they'd ever done and people who thought it was just an unpleasant job and people who thought they should have never done it at all, so there were opinions of all kinds."
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"Theory said one thing and the experiment said something different, so that was the stimulus that started me going, that there was something there to be explained, which wasn't understood and to try to see why that experiment gave the answer it did, so it was a big opportunity for a young student starting to have actually an experiment which contradicted the theory, so that's was my chance to understand that."
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"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."
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"I think science and religion should be separate."
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"The point of fact is, just in simple ways, you can see how much better things have gotten. I mean, when I was a child, I lived in England, and England was just amazingly polluted. We didn't use that word. We just said it was it all covered with soot."
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"You could say science also is an art."
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"I think the biggest misconception is that everybody has to learn mathematics. That seems to be a complete mistake."
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"We won't really understand the brain until we can make models of it which are analog rather than digital, which nobody seems to be trying very much."
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"The brain, being analog, is able to grasp images so much better. The brain is just designed for comparing images and some patterns - patterns in space and patterns in time - which we do amazingly well. Computers can do it, too, but not in anything like the same kind of flexibility."
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"I just enjoy calculating, and it's an instrument I know how to play. It's almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that's how I feel when proving a theorem."
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"In religion, you're supposed to be somehow in touch with something deep and full of mysteries."
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"It's amazing how much progress there's been in China, and also India. Those are the places that really matter - they're half of the world's population. They're the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago. And I don't see anything that's going to stop that."
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"As far as I can see, our concentration of different abilities in one species - there's nothing I can see that in this Darwinian evolution that could've done that. So it seems to be a miracle of some sort."
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"I think we're doing pretty well. It's clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news."
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"The Ph.D. system was designed for a job in academics. And it works really well if you really want to be an academic, and the system actually works quite well. So for people who have the gift and like to go spend their lives as scholars, it's fine. But the trouble is that it's become a kind of a meal ticket - you can't get a job if you don't have a Ph.D."
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