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Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

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
Theory
Progress
Wrong
Often
Corrected
Science
Theories
Better
Vague
Later
Built

More quotes by Freeman Dyson

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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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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.
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The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories.
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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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Almost everything about the universe is astounding.
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It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
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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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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I think the fact that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and talked about anthrax bombs probably helped because at least we... people had the understanding before the war began that's something we didn't want to get into.
Freeman Dyson
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There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.
Freeman Dyson
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To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.
Freeman Dyson
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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.]
Freeman Dyson
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All the time worrying about pushing the children and getting them to be mathematically literate and all that stuff. It's terribly hard on the kids. It's also hard on the teachers. And I think it's totally useless.
Freeman Dyson
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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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I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.
Freeman Dyson
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Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe and it's the same universe with two different windows.
Freeman Dyson
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Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.
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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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
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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