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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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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
Hands
Kings
Aliens
Ufo
May
Planets
Isolated
Benign
Intelligence
Philosopher
Swept
Creating
Apart
Sweeping
Groups
Cancer
Galaxy
Influence
Indeed
Heavens
Hand
Planet
Exploitation
Purposeless
Heaven
Across
Technological
Irresistibly

More quotes by 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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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 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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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
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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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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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Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.
Freeman Dyson
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It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true
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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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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Of course, long-distance running has to do with the fact that we're hunters.
Freeman Dyson
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It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
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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Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.
Freeman Dyson
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Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute.
Freeman Dyson
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Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.
Freeman Dyson
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I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we're going to be outstripped by the machines.
Freeman Dyson
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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.
Freeman Dyson
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Well germ warfare of course exists. There have been on a small scale... There have been, of course, a few people who got killed with anthrax right here in Princeton.
Freeman Dyson
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For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin.
Freeman Dyson