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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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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
Listen
Observations
Theory
Theories
Public
Gaps
Knowledge
Impressed
Change
Observation
Debate
Enormous
Superficiality
Climate
Debates

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If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter.
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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.
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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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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 think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we're going to be outstripped by the machines.
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It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.
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Of course, long-distance running has to do with the fact that we're hunters.
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Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.
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The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories.
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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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Some of my friends like to keep science and religion together, but I certainly like to keep them separate.
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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.
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The world is just - it's wonderful when you look at all the detail. It's just amazing.
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Everything in my life was luck. The key to having an interesting life is to always say yes to anything crazy.
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In religion, you're supposed to be somehow in touch with something deep and full of mysteries.
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Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
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As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.
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Science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly. I mean World War I was a horrible war and it was mostly the fault of science, so that was in a way a very bad time for science, but on the other hand we were winning all these Nobel Prizes.
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It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
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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.
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