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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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Concept

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We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!
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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.
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Nothing is boring if you look at carefully.
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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.
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Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.
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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.
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If we want to go to space with humans, that's for fun not for science. Human adventures in space are just sporting events.
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Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
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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.
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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.
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Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word.
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CO2 is so beneficial...it would be crazy to try to reduce it
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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.
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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.
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The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it's mostly rubbish.
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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.
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Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
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Of course, long-distance running has to do with the fact that we're hunters.
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We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.
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Plasma seems to have the kinds of properties one would like for life. It's somewhat like liquid water--unpredictable and thus able to behave in an enormously complex fashion. It could probably carry as much information as DNA does. It has at least the potential for organizing itself in interesting ways.
Freeman Dyson