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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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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
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More quotes by Freeman Dyson

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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.
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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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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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
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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
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Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
Freeman Dyson
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I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.
Freeman Dyson
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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.
Freeman Dyson
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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
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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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Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word.
Freeman Dyson
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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.
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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[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians
Freeman Dyson
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The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines.
Freeman Dyson
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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.
Freeman Dyson
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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
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As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.
Freeman Dyson
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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
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We won't really understand the brain until we can make models of it which are analog rather than digital, which nobody seems to be trying very much.
Freeman Dyson