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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

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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
Problems
Impossible
Difficult
History
Young
Problem
Solved
People
Ignorant
Mathematics

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It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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It makes very little sense to believe the output of the climate models.
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[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians
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That's the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.
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I think the biggest misconception is that everybody has to learn mathematics. That seems to be a complete mistake.
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We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!
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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.
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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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Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.
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Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.
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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.
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If we want to go to space with humans, that's for fun not for science. Human adventures in space are just sporting events.
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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.
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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.
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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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