Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson

Theoretical Physicist

Freeman Dyson was a theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his contributions to quantum mechanics and his visionary ideas on technology and humanity.

Thinking People Science Technology Mean Giving
Born
December 15, 1923
Died
February 28, 2020
Quotes
228
Rank
#4924

Quote collection

Freeman Dyson quotes (page 8 of 12)

228 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Freeman Dyson Theoretical Physicist
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"I think the biggest misconception about mathematics is that everybody has to learn it. That seems to be a complete mistake. All the time worrying about pushing the children and getting them to be mathematically literate and all that stuff. It's terribly hard on the kids. It's also hard on the teachers. And I think it's totally useless. 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."

Teacher Children Mistake
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"The world is just - it's wonderful when you look at all the detail. It's just amazing. Nothing is boring if you look at it carefully."

World Wonderful Boring
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"I think it's much better to have your eyes open, but on the other hand, of course it can do harm if you tell people look, there's all these terrible things you can do and then some idiot may go ahead and do it."

Eye Thinking Hands
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"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."

Eye Years One Day
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"The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered."

Children Pain Childbirth
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"There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global."

Doubt World Global Warming
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"I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do."

Thinking Brain Machines
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"When World War II came along, which was when I was a teenager, we all expected we would have anthrax bombs and this kind of stuff. We thought it would be a biological war. Fortunately it wasn't and, but it's because the danger is still there and by some miracle we escaped all that, so you never can tell what it going to happen, but biology certainly could be even worse than physics and chemistry."

War Teenager Miracle
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"And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data."

Mother Animal Data
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"Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams."

Dream Fiction Landscape
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"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."

Moving Technology Space
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"Life is nature's way to give mind oportunities it wouldn't otherwise had."

Life Nature Giving
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"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."

Experts Facts Honest
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"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."

Revenge Science Boys
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"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."

Twenties Firsts Physics
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"The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people."

Technology People Problem
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"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."

Kings Cancer Hands
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"The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science."

Philosophy Philosophical One Direction
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"The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do."

Jobs Technology Effectiveness
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