Top 233 Quotes & Sayings by Freeman Dyson - Page 4

You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too.

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.

People who travel in China tell me that the mood there is still very upbeat, because their media is different from our media. Chinese media emphasize how well things are going and suppress the bad news and publish the good news.

Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.

Mathematics is really an art, not a science.

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.

It's amazing how much progress there's been in China, and also India. Those are the places that really matter - they're half of the world's population. They're the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago. And I don't see anything that's going to stop that.

Of course, long-distance running has to do with the fact that we're hunters.

That's what I learned from World War II. Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

I think the biggest misconception is that everybody has to learn mathematics. That seems to be a complete mistake.

The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well.

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

If you go to London now, not everything is beautiful, but it's amazingly better than it was. And the Thames is certainly a lot better: There are fish in the Thames.

You could say science also is an art.

The brain, being analog, is able to grasp images so much better. The brain is just designed for comparing images and some patterns - patterns in space and patterns in time - which we do amazingly well. Computers can do it, too, but not in anything like the same kind of flexibility.

Everything in my life was luck.

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.

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.

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.

I think science and religion should be separate.

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.

Some of my friends like to keep science and religion together, but I certainly like to keep them separate.

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.

The science window gives you a view of the world, and the religion window gives you a totally different view. You can't look at both of them at the same time, but they're both true.

Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it's the same universe with two different windows.

The Ph.D. system was designed for a job in academics. And it works really well if you really want to be an academic, and the system actually works quite well. So for people who have the gift and like to go spend their lives as scholars, it's fine. But the trouble is that it's become a kind of a meal ticket - you can't get a job if you don't have a Ph.D.

I'm prejudiced about education altogether. I think it's terribly overrated. It wastes a tremendous amount of time - especially for women, it's particularly badly timed. If they're doing a Ph.D., they have a conflict between raising a family or finishing the degree, which is just at the worst time - between the ages of 25 to 30 or whatever it is. It ruins the five years of their lives.

The world is just - it's wonderful when you look at all the detail. It's just amazing.

I think we're doing pretty well. It's clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news.

It's us that's really amazing.

It's us that's really amazing. 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.

In religion, you're supposed to be somehow in touch with something deep and full of mysteries.

We won't really understand the brain until we can make models of it which are analog rather than digital, which nobody seems to be trying very much.

That's the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well. It's amazing how much progress there's been in China, and also India. Those are the places that really matter - they're half of the world's population. They're the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago. And I don't see anything that's going to stop that.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin. I just enjoy calculating, and it's an instrument I know how to play. It's almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that's how I feel when proving a theorem.

The point of fact is, just in simple ways, you can see how much better things have gotten. I mean, when I was a child, I lived in England, and England was just amazingly polluted. We didn't use that word. We just said it was it all covered with soot.

There are two different ways of looking at the universe; and it's the same universe with two different windows. The science window gives you a view of the world, and the religion window gives you a totally different view. You can't look at both of them at the same time, but they're both true.

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.

I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we're going to be outstripped by the machines.

Of course, the English countryside is completely artificial. It was naturally a forest; they chopped down the trees and made it into what it is now: really a beautiful country.

I just enjoy calculating, and it's an instrument I know how to play. It's almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that's how I feel when proving a theorem.

Most of what we see in the universe is dust.

You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too. And that, by some miracle, 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.

I mean science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly.

Dropping of the atomic bomb was the main subject of conversation for many years and so people had very strong feelings about it on both sides and people who thought it was the greatest thing they'd ever done and people who thought it was just an unpleasant job and people who thought they should have never done it at all, so there were opinions of all kinds.

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.

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.

Mostly I'm just writing books for the public, and so I try to describe for the public what the choices are, what they might have to expect in the future and so by warning people ahead of time maybe you have an effect.

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.

Some things go better than you expected, other things go worse, so I'm... I think the only sensible thing is just to wait and see and what I'm doing when I'm writing books - I'm not doing science so much anymore.

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.

Theory said one thing and the experiment said something different, so that was the stimulus that started me going, that there was something there to be explained, which wasn't understood and to try to see why that experiment gave the answer it did, so it was a big opportunity for a young student starting to have actually an experiment which contradicted the theory, so that's was my chance to understand that.