Quote

The idea that God may be approached and understood through intellectual analysis is uniquely Christian... It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind.

Freeman Dyson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Ideas
Grew
Accidents
World
Modern
Analysis
Probably
Europe
Christian
Intellectual
Idea
Understood
Science
Behinds
Uniquely
Left
Behind
Approached
May
Rest
Accident

More quotes by Freeman Dyson

Image
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
Image
Computer models of the climate....[are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs.
Freeman Dyson
Image
A model is done when nothing else can be taken out.
Freeman Dyson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Technology without morality is barbarous morality without technology is impotent.
Freeman Dyson
Image
We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.
Freeman Dyson
Image
The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.
Freeman Dyson
Image
Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.
Freeman Dyson
Image
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
Image
When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in muddled, incomplete and confusing form. ... For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.
Freeman Dyson
Image
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
Image
The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.
Freeman Dyson
Image
In religion, you're supposed to be somehow in touch with something deep and full of mysteries.
Freeman Dyson
Image
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
Image
So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh.
Freeman Dyson
Image
There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.
Freeman Dyson
Image
If you're in the business world, that's what's expected: You should go bust and then start again on something else. So it's a much more relaxed kind of a culture. It's also competitive, but not in such a vicious way. I think the academic world is actually much more destructive of young people.
Freeman Dyson
Image
If you go to London now, not everything is beautiful, but it's amazingly better than it was. And the Thames is certainly a lot better: There are fish in the Thames.
Freeman Dyson