Freeman Dyson - Science Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

View all Freeman Dyson Quotes
I have five minutes left to give you a message to take home. The message is simple. "God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world". This was said by Francis Bacon, one of the founding fathers of modern science, almost four hundred years ago. Bacon was the smartest man of his time, with the possible exception of William Shakespeare.

Freeman Dyson
Rutherford's discovery was the beginning of the science that came to be called nuclear physics.... The projectiles that he used to explore the nucleus were particles produced in the disintegration of radium... discovered by Marie Curie in 1898. The particles are helium nuclei that are emitted at high speed when radium atoms decay... The twenty years between 1909 and 1929 were the era of tabletop nuclear physics.... Small and simple experiments were sufficient to establish the basic laws of nuclear physics.

Freeman Dyson
There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions.

Freeman Dyson
Science as subversion has a long history.... Davis and Sakharov belong to an old tradition in science that goes all the way back to the rebels Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley in the eighteenth century, to Galileo and Giordano Bruno in the seventeenth and sixteenth. If science ceases to be a rebellion against authority, then it does not deserve the talents of our brightest children.... We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.

Freeman Dyson