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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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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
World
Winning
Mostly
War
Horrible
Prizes
Science
Faults
Blamed
Hands
Nuclear
Horrors
Today
Horror
Rightly
Mean
Weapons
Nobel
Way
Quite
Fault
Time
Hand
Prize

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all. There's no reason why one should be scared.
Freeman Dyson
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In religion, you're supposed to be somehow in touch with something deep and full of mysteries.
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Nothing is boring if you look at carefully.
Freeman Dyson
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If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter.
Freeman Dyson
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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.
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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I like people who are working on practical things and who are working in teams. It's not so important to get the glory. It's much more important to get something that works. It's a better way to live.
Freeman Dyson
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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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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'm prejudiced about education altogether. I think it's terribly overrated.
Freeman Dyson
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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.
Freeman Dyson
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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
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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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I don't know, but I think it's quite possible that the more science you teach kids in school the more it turns them off, so I don't know. I mean you never can tell which way it will go.
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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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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Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their normal business of selling and repairing bicycles.
Freeman Dyson
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Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
Freeman Dyson