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All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. Describing John von Neumann's aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations.

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
Science
Solve
Processes
Problem
Large
Computers
Computer
Aspiration
Meteorology
Problems
Stable
Unstable
Control
Application
Sufficiently
Shall
Weather
Predict
Small
John
Describing
Process
Despite
Sensitivity

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.
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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.
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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.
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The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered.
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It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
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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.
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Of course, long-distance running has to do with the fact that we're hunters.
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Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.
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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.
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When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories.
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Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.
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The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well.
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The seeds from Ramanujan's garden have been blowing on the wind and have been sprouting all over the landscape. [On the stimulating effects of Ramanujan's mathematical legacy.]
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People who travel in China tell me that the mood there is still very upbeat, because their media is different from our media. Chinese media emphasize how well things are going and suppress the bad news and publish the good news.
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CO2 is so beneficial...it would be crazy to try to reduce it
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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.
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