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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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Often
Discover
Science
Driven
Launched
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Tools
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Revolution
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Concept

More quotes by Freeman Dyson

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Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.
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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As far as I can see, our concentration of different abilities in one species - there's nothing I can see that in this Darwinian evolution that could've done that. So it seems to be a miracle of some sort.
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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Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.
Freeman Dyson
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To me, mathematics is like playing the violin. Some people can do it - others can't. If you don't have it, then there's no point in pretending.
Freeman Dyson
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For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin.
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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The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.
Freeman Dyson
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Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.
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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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
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What the world needs is a small, compact, flexible fusion technology that could make electricity where and when it is needed. The existing fusion program is leading to a huge source of centralized power, at a price that nobody except a government can afford.
Freeman Dyson
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I think the fact that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and talked about anthrax bombs probably helped because at least we... people had the understanding before the war began that's something we didn't want to get into.
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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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
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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.
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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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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I think it's a big mistake to decide too soon what you're going to do with your life.
Freeman Dyson