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The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.

Freeman Dyson

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Freeman Dyson
Age: 96 †
Born: 1923
Born: December 15
Died: 2020
Died: February 28
Mathematician
Nuclear Physicist
Physicist
Professor
Theoretical Physicist
Crowthorne
Berkshire
Freeman John Dyson
Freeman J. Dyson
Lives
Technologies
Individual
Scale
Problem
Ethical
Human
Scales
Humans
Raise
Work
Raises
People
Problems
Brightening
Technology
Fewest

More quotes by Freeman Dyson

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The idea that God may be approached and understood through intellectual analysis is uniquely Christian... It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind.
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The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well.
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I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence.
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The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.
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The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time.
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All the time worrying about pushing the children and getting them to be mathematically literate and all that stuff. It's terribly hard on the kids. It's also hard on the teachers. And I think it's totally useless.
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I don't know, but I think it's quite possible that the more science you teach kids in school the more it turns them off, so I don't know. I mean you never can tell which way it will go.
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We simply don't know yet what's going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere.
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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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Intelligence may indeed be a benign influence creating isolated groups of philosopher-kings far apart in the heavens... On the other hand, intelligence may be a cancer of purposeless technological exploitation, sweeping across a galaxy as irresistibly as it has swept across our own planet.
Freeman Dyson
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If you go to London now, not everything is beautiful, but it's amazingly better than it was. And the Thames is certainly a lot better: There are fish in the Thames.
Freeman Dyson
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Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.
Freeman Dyson
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It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.
Freeman Dyson
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Of course, the English countryside is completely artificial. It was naturally a forest they chopped down the trees and made it into what it is now: really a beautiful country.
Freeman Dyson
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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.
Freeman Dyson
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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
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Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.
Freeman Dyson
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I'm prejudiced about education altogether. I think it's terribly overrated.
Freeman Dyson
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Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe and it's the same universe with two different windows.
Freeman Dyson
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If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter.
Freeman Dyson