"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."
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Freeman Dyson quotes (page 3 of 12)
228 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear."
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"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."
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"We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!"
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"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."
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"Everything in my life was luck. The key to having an interesting life is to always say "yes" to anything crazy."
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"There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it's mostly rubbish."
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"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."
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"Nothing is boring if you look at carefully."
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"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."
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"I'm happy that I've raised six kids, and not one of them is a Ph.D."
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"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 our 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."
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"Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist."
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"We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too."
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