Freeman Dyson Quotes About Science

Quotes about: Science

• A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.

  Freeman Dyson

  Science, Ideas, Engineering

  "Disturbing the Universe". Book by Freeman Dyson, 1979.

• Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.

  Freeman Dyson

  Life, Mother, Art

• The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.

  Freeman Dyson

  Science, Details, Architecture

  Freeman J. Dyson (2016). “Dear Professor Dyson: Twenty Years of Correspondence Between Freeman Dyson and Undergraduate Students on Science, Technology, Society and Life”, p.357, World Scientific

• Science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practise it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. ... Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours.

  Freeman Dyson

  Nature, Art, Philosophy

• Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

  Freeman Dyson

  Science, Imagination, Nomenclature

• Walking the streets of Tokyo with Hawking in his wheelchair ... I felt as if I were taking a walk through Galilee with Jesus Christ [as] crowds of Japanese silently streamed after us, stretching out their hands to touch Hawking's wheelchair. ... The crowds had streamed after Einstein [on Einstein's visit to Japan in 1922] as they streamed after Hawking seventy years later. ... They showed exquisite choice in their heroes. ... Somehow they understood that Einstein and Hawking were not just great scientists, but great human beings.

  Freeman Dyson

  Jesus, Hero, Science

• 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.

  Freeman Dyson

  Science, Ideas, Trying

  Freeman Dyson (2013). “FROM EROS TO GAIA”, p.133, Pantheon

• The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. ... It was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

  Freeman Dyson

  Horse, New York, Science

  "Infinite in All Directions" by Freeman Dyson, Ch. 8, (p. 135), 1988.

• The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines.

  Freeman Dyson

  Science, Doctrine, Tools

  Freeman Dyson (2014). “The Scientist as Rebel”, p.29, New York Review of Books

• Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.

  Freeman Dyson

  Science, Reality, Understanding

• The most revolutionary aspect of technology is its mobility. Anybody can learn it. It jumps easily over barriers of race and language. ... The new technology of microchips and computer software is learned much faster than the old technology of coal and iron. It took three generations of misery for the older industrial countries to master the technology of coal and iron. The new industrial countries of East Asia, South Korea, and Singapore and Taiwan, mastered the new technology and made the jump from poverty to wealth in a single generation.

  Freeman Dyson

  Country, Science, Technology

  "Infinite in All Directions: Gifford lectures given at Aberdeen" by Freeman Dyson, (p. 270), 2004.

• For me too, the periodic table was a passion. ... As a boy, I stood in front of the display for hours, thinking how wonderful it was that each of those metal foils and jars of gas had its own distinct personality.

  Freeman Dyson

  Passion, Science, Thinking

• One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.

  Freeman Dyson

  Education, Science, Imagination

• 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

  Science, Carbon Cycle, Tree

  Freeman Dyson (2013). “FROM EROS TO GAIA”, p.172, Pantheon

• All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. Describing John von Neumann's aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations.

  Freeman Dyson

  Science, Weather, Meteorology

• 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.

  Freeman Dyson

  Fashion, Science, Dna

• 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

  Science, Voice, Giving

• The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

  Freeman Dyson

  Mean, Science, Carbon Cycle

• I belonged to a small minority of boys who were lacking in physical strength and athletic prowess. ... We found our refuge in science. ... We learned that science is a revenge of victims against oppressors, that science is a territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred.

  Freeman Dyson

  Revenge, Science, Boys

  "Brilliant Light" by Oliver Sacks, www.newyorker.com. December 20, 1999.

• Most of the crackpot papers which are submitted to The Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published. When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer himself it will be only half-understood; to everybody else it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.

  Freeman Dyson

  Crazy, Science, Discovery

• Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.

  Freeman Dyson

  Real, Science, Views

  Freeman J Dyson (2015). “Birds and Frogs: Selected Papers of Freeman Dyson, 1990–2014”, p.192, World Scientific Publishing Company

• One of the memorable moments of my life was when Willard Libby came to Princeton with a little jar full of crystals of barium xenate. A stable compound, looking like common salt, but much heavier. This was the magic of chemistry, to see xenon trapped into a crystal.

  Freeman Dyson

  Xenon, Memorable, Science

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