Freeman Dyson Quotes

135 Sourced Quotes

Science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practise it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines.... Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours.

Freeman Dyson
The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.

Freeman Dyson
When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories.

Freeman Dyson
Like all the new technologies that have arisen from scientific knowledge, biotechnology is a tool that can be used either for good or for evil purposes. The role of ethics is to strengthen the good and avoid the evil.

Freeman Dyson
My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models.

Freeman Dyson
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.

Freeman Dyson
Nature's pruning of the unfit will limit the spread of insanity among species in the galaxy, as it does among individuals on earth. Sanity is, in its essence, nothing more than the ability to live in harmony with nature's laws.

Freeman Dyson
One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.

Freeman Dyson
The place of mathematics in the physical sciences is not something that can be defined once and for all. The interrelations of mathematics with science are as rich and various as the texture of science itself.

Freeman Dyson
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.

Freeman Dyson
If the tools are bad, nature's voice is muffled. If the tools are good, nature will give us a clear answer to a clear question.

Freeman Dyson
That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.

Freeman Dyson
Since the universe is on a one-way slide toward a state of final death in which energy is maximally degraded, how does it manage, like King Charles, to take such an unconsciously long time a-dying.

Freeman Dyson
It used to be said, before the recent era of revolutionary discoveries, that science was organized common sense. In the modern era it would be more accurate to define science as organized unpredictability.

Freeman Dyson
Heat is disordered energy. So with two words the nature of heat is explained.

Freeman Dyson
I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it is passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be considered to be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. We are the chief inlets of God on this planet at the present stage of his development.

Freeman Dyson
Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.

Freeman Dyson
The seeds from Ramanujan's garden have been blowing on the wind and have been sprouting all over the landscape.
[On the stimulating effects of Ramanujan's mathematical legacy.]

Freeman Dyson
At Cornell, I was simply puzzled and mystified by [Richard] Feynman's stuff. I couldn't figure out how he was getting all those amazing answers which turned out to be right. It was just a great mystery. I didn't understand it and, as far as I could tell, nobody else did.

Freeman Dyson
We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!

Freeman Dyson
The theory of the expanding universe is in some respects so preposterous that we naturally hesitate to commit ourselves to it. It contains elements apparently so incredible that I feel almost an indignation that anyone should believe in it - except myself.

Freeman Dyson
The world of science and the world of literature have much in common. Each is an international club, helping to tie mankind together across barriers of nationality, race, and language.

Freeman Dyson
We have learned that matter is weird stuff. It is weird enough, so that it does not limit God's freedom to make it do what he pleases.

Freeman Dyson
Dick Feynman told me about his "sum over histories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything it likes," he said. "It goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave function." I said to him, "You're crazy." But he wasn't.

Freeman Dyson
Most of the 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.

Freeman Dyson
I hope... to hasten the arrival of the day when eschatology, the study of the end of the universe, will be a respectable scientific discipline and not merely a branch of theology.

Freeman Dyson
Science is even more unpredictable than history. Every important discovery in science is by definition unpredictable. If it were predictable, it would not be an important discovery. The purpose of science is to create opportunities for unpredictable things to happen. When nature does something unexpected, we learn something about how nature works.

Freeman Dyson
As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.

Freeman Dyson
Looking back through the long past we picture the beginning of the world - a primeval chaos which time has fashioned into the universe that we know. Its vastness appalls the mind; space boundless though not infinite, according to the strange doctrine of science.

Freeman Dyson
If we have still to leave the stellar universe a region of hidden mystery, yet it seems as though, in our exploration, we have been able to glimpse the outline of some vast combination which unites even the farthest stars into an organised system.

Freeman Dyson