"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?"
"Most of the crackpot papers which are submitted to The Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published. When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer himself it will be only half-understood; to everybody else it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope."
7 likes
Source: The Scientist As Rebel. Book by Freeman Dyson, 2006.
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Freeman Dyson
"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."