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It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

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
Better
Vague
Wrong

More quotes by Freeman Dyson

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People who travel in China tell me that the mood there is still very upbeat, because their media is different from our media. Chinese media emphasize how well things are going and suppress the bad news and publish the good news.
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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Everything in my life was luck.
Freeman Dyson
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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.
Freeman Dyson
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The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.
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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Computer models of the climate....[are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs.
Freeman Dyson
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Most of the papers which are submitted to the Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published.
Freeman Dyson
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I think the biggest misconception is that everybody has to learn mathematics. That seems to be a complete mistake.
Freeman Dyson
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No matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.
Freeman Dyson
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Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.
Freeman Dyson
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It is in the long run essential to the growth of any new and high civilization that small groups of men can escape from their neighbors and from their government, to go and live as they please in the wilderness. A truly isolated, small, and creative society will never again be possible on this planet.
Freeman Dyson
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Almost everything about the universe is astounding.
Freeman Dyson
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The world is just - it's wonderful when you look at all the detail. It's just amazing.
Freeman Dyson
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New directions in science are launched by new tools much more often than by new concepts. The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained.
Freeman Dyson
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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
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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
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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.
Freeman Dyson
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I like people who are working on practical things and who are working in teams. It's not so important to get the glory. It's much more important to get something that works. It's a better way to live.
Freeman Dyson
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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.
Freeman Dyson