"Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress."
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Quote collection
Freeman Dyson quotes (page 5 of 12)
228 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"New directions in science are launched by new tools much more often than by new concepts. The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained."
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"We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations."
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"The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines."
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"The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well."
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"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."
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"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."
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"There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures."
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"A model is done when nothing else can be taken out."
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"Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague."
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"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."
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"The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible."
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"If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter."
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"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."
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"When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in muddled, incomplete and confusing form. ... For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope."
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