Freeman Dyson Quotes
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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.
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The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all. There's no reason why one should be scared.
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I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.
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Religion will always remain a powerful force in the history of our species. To me, the meaning of progress in religion is simply this, that as we move from the past to the future the good works inspired by religion should more and more prevail over the evil.
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Nobody knows what dark matter is. It is another deep mystery waiting to be explored. We know only that it is there, and that it weighs more than the stuff that we can see.
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It is a curious paradox that several of the greatest and most creative spirits in science, after achieving important discoveries by following their unfettered imaginations, were in their later years obsessed with reductionist philosophy and as a result became sterile. Hilbert was a prime example of this paradox. Einstein was another.
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An awareness of our smallness may help to redeem us from the arrogance which is the besetting sin of the scientists.
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Over periods of 10,000 years the distinctions between Western and Eastern and African cultures lose all meaning. Over a time span of 100,000 years we are all Africans. And over a time span of 300 million years we are all amphibians, waddling uncertainly out of dried-up ponds onto the alien and hostile land.
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It is a curious accident of history that the Christian religion became heavily involved with theology. No other religion finds it necessary to formulate elaborately precise statements about the abstract qualities and relationships of gods and humans. ... The idea that God may be approached and understood through intellectual analysis is uniquely Christian.
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Unfortunately, things are different in climate science because the arguments have become heavily politicised. To say that the dogmas are wrong has become politically incorrect.
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The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm.
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When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words. Things behave in the same way everywhere, but words do not. ... Theology works in one culture alone. If you have not grown up in Polkinghorne's culture, where words such as 'incarnation' and 'trinity' have a profound meaning, you cannot share his vision.
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If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.
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The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do.
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Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.
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It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.
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I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.
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I do not claim any ability to read God's mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity.
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Astronomers have so far escaped the extreme specialization that has overtaken physicists. Telescopes are big, but they are not as complicated as accelerators. Observations with a big telescope can be carried out in hours rather than years.
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Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.