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

More quotes by 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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The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all.
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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.
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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.
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Everything in my life was luck.
Freeman Dyson
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That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.
Freeman Dyson
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[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians
Freeman Dyson
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Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.
Freeman Dyson
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I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.
Freeman Dyson
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And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data.
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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Of course, long-distance running has to do with the fact that we're hunters.
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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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.
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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As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.
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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We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!
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 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