Freeman Dyson Quotes

135 Sourced Quotes

To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.

Freeman Dyson
We have seen particle physics emerge as the playground of group theory.

Freeman Dyson
Not only is Space from the point of view of life and humanity empty, but Time is empty also. Life is like a little glow, scarcely kindled yet, in these void immensities.

Freeman Dyson
As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so.

Freeman Dyson
Mathematical intuition is more often conservative than revolutionary, more often hampering than liberating.

Freeman Dyson
There is nothing so big nor so crazy that one out of a million technological societies may not feel itself driven to do, provided it is physically possible.

Freeman Dyson
Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.

Freeman Dyson
Physics is littered with the corpses of dead unified field theories.

Freeman Dyson
The difference between a text without problems and a text with problems is like the difference between learning to read a language and learning to speak it.

Freeman Dyson
The unanimity with which the galaxies are running away looks almost as though they had a pointed aversion to us. We wonder why we should be shunned as though our system were a plague spot in the universe.

Freeman Dyson
Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs.

Freeman Dyson
The most serious uncertainty affecting the ultimate fate of the universe is the question whether the proton is absolutely stable against decay into lighter particles. If the proton is unstable, all matter is transitory and must dissolve into radiation.

Freeman Dyson
When will the third romantic age in the history of spaceflight begin? The third romantic age will see little model sailboats spreading their wings to the sun in space.

Freeman Dyson
On being asked what he meant by the beauty of a mathematical theory of physics, Dirac replied that if the questioner was a mathematician then he did not need to be told, but were he not a mathematician then nothing would be able to convince him of it.

Freeman Dyson
A physicist builds theories with mathematical materials, because the mathematics enables him to imagine more than he can clearly think.

Freeman Dyson