Quote

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

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
Ways
Explain
Often
Discover
Science
Driven
Launched
Much
Effect
Directions
Way
Concepts
Explained
Things
Tools
Tool
Revolution
Entrepreneur
Effects
Concept

More quotes by Freeman Dyson

Image
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.
Freeman Dyson
Image
Everything in my life was luck.
Freeman Dyson
Image
That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.
Freeman Dyson
Image
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
Image
Mostly I'm just writing books for the public, and so I try to describe for the public what the choices are, what they might have to expect in the future and so by warning people ahead of time maybe you have an effect.
Freeman Dyson
Image
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
Image
A model is done when nothing else can be taken out.
Freeman Dyson
Image
Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.
Freeman Dyson
Image
The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design.
Freeman Dyson
Image
The language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand.
Freeman Dyson
Image
I think science and religion should be separate.
Freeman Dyson
Image
I'm prejudiced about education altogether. I think it's terribly overrated.
Freeman Dyson
Image
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
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
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.
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
For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin. I just enjoy calculating, and it's an instrument I know how to play. It's almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that's how I feel when proving a theorem.
Freeman Dyson
Image
CO2 is so beneficial...it would be crazy to try to reduce it
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
The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines.
Freeman Dyson