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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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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
Think
Worry
Literate
Thinking
Getting
Terribly
Stuff
Worrying
Kids
Pushing
Also
Teachers
Hard
Useless
Children
Totally
Time
Teacher
Mathematically

More quotes by Freeman Dyson

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You could say science also is an art.
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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 only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all.
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Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.
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Nothing is boring if you look at carefully.
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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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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.
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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.
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I'm prejudiced about education altogether. I think it's terribly overrated.
Freeman Dyson
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I grew up in England and we spent most of the time on Latin and Greek and very little on science, and I think that was good because it meant we didn't get turned off. It was... Science was something we did for fun and not because we had to.
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It is in the long run essential to the growth of any new and high civilization that small groups of men can escape from their neighbors and from their government, to go and live as they please in the wilderness. A truly isolated, small, and creative society will never again be possible on this planet.
Freeman Dyson
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In religion, you're supposed to be somehow in touch with something deep and full of mysteries.
Freeman Dyson
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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
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Intelligence may indeed be a benign influence creating isolated groups of philosopher-kings far apart in the heavens... On the other hand, intelligence may be a cancer of purposeless technological exploitation, sweeping across a galaxy as irresistibly as it has swept across our own planet.
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
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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.
Freeman Dyson
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We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.
Freeman Dyson
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Plasma seems to have the kinds of properties one would like for life. It's somewhat like liquid water--unpredictable and thus able to behave in an enormously complex fashion. It could probably carry as much information as DNA does. It has at least the potential for organizing itself in interesting ways.
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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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The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.
Freeman Dyson