Quote

Computer models of the climate....[are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs.

Freeman Dyson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Inputs
Dubious
Input
Models
Climate
Computer
Business
Good

More quotes by Freeman Dyson

Image
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
Image
Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
Freeman Dyson
Image
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.
Freeman Dyson
Image
Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
Freeman Dyson
Image
Everything in my life was luck. The key to having an interesting life is to always say yes to anything crazy.
Freeman Dyson
Image
I grew up in England and we spent most of the time on Latin and Greek and very little on science, and I think that was good because it meant we didn't get turned off. It was... Science was something we did for fun and not because we had to.
Freeman Dyson
Image
The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes - as well as humans. It is not important that we didn't actually finish the human sequence yet.
Freeman Dyson
Image
A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.
Freeman Dyson
Image
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.
Freeman Dyson
Image
It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.
Freeman Dyson
Image
That's, of course, the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.
Freeman Dyson
Image
Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute.
Freeman Dyson
Image
The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.
Freeman Dyson
Image
Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
Freeman Dyson
Image
We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!
Freeman Dyson
Image
Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.
Freeman Dyson
Image
The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.
Freeman Dyson
Image
If you're in the business world, that's what's expected: You should go bust and then start again on something else. So it's a much more relaxed kind of a culture. It's also competitive, but not in such a vicious way. I think the academic world is actually much more destructive of young people.
Freeman Dyson
Image
We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.
Freeman Dyson
Image
I mean science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly.
Freeman Dyson