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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
Mathematics
Problems
Impossible
Difficult
History
Young
Problem
Solved
People
Ignorant

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We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.
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The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.
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We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!
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As far as I can see, our concentration of different abilities in one species - there's nothing I can see that in this Darwinian evolution that could've done that. So it seems to be a miracle of some sort.
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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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I think it's a big mistake to decide too soon what you're going to do with your life.
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Everything in my life was luck. The key to having an interesting life is to always say yes to anything crazy.
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The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.
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I think science and religion should be separate.
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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.
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The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered.
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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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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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Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word.
Freeman Dyson
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I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence.
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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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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Well germ warfare of course exists. There have been on a small scale... There have been, of course, a few people who got killed with anthrax right here in Princeton.
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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The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time.
Freeman Dyson