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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
Another
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Enough
Meaning
Mind
Question
Think
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Wise
Life
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More quotes by 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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It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.
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That's 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 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.
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It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values.
Freeman Dyson
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There are two different ways of looking at the universe and it's the same universe with two different windows. The science window gives you a view of the world, and the religion window gives you a totally different view. You can't look at both of them at the same time, but they're both true.
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The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time.
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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.
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The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered.
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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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We do not know how much of the environmental change is due to human activities and how much [is due] to long-term natural processes over which we have no control.
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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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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It makes very little sense to believe the output of the climate models.
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
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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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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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I think it's a big mistake to decide too soon what you're going to do with your life.
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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Everything in my life was luck. The key to having an interesting life is to always say yes to anything crazy.
Freeman Dyson