"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?"
"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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Source: Freeman J. Dyson (2016). “Dear Professor Dyson: Twenty Years of Correspondence Between Freeman Dyson and Undergraduate Students on Science, Technology, Society and Life”, p.129, World Scientific
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"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."