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You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?

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
Life
Asks
Purpose
Read
Fog
Another
Answer
Enough
Meaning
Mind
Question
Think
Answers
Thinking
Wise

More quotes by 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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In religion, you're supposed to be somehow in touch with something deep and full of mysteries.
Freeman Dyson
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I grew up in England and we spent most of the time on Latin and Greek and very little on science, and I think that was good because it meant we didn't get turned off. It was... Science was something we did for fun and not because we had to.
Freeman Dyson
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It makes very little sense to believe the output of the climate models.
Freeman Dyson
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A model is done when nothing else can be taken out.
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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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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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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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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Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.
Freeman Dyson
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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
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Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.
Freeman Dyson
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I mean science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly.
Freeman Dyson
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The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well.
Freeman Dyson
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Nothing is boring if you look at carefully.
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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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
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Science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly. I mean World War I was a horrible war and it was mostly the fault of science, so that was in a way a very bad time for science, but on the other hand we were winning all these Nobel Prizes.
Freeman Dyson
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I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.
Freeman Dyson
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I think the biggest misconception is that everybody has to learn mathematics. That seems to be a complete mistake.
Freeman Dyson