Freeman Dyson Quotes

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Freeman Dyson

Profession : Physicist

Birth : December 15, 1923

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

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

Freeman Dyson

Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs.

Freeman Dyson

It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.

Freeman Dyson

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

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.

Freeman Dyson

I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.

Freeman Dyson

Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.

Freeman Dyson

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

Freeman Dyson

The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.

Freeman Dyson

There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.

Freeman Dyson

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.

Freeman Dyson

The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm.

Freeman Dyson

I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.

Freeman Dyson

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.

Freeman Dyson

The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.

Freeman Dyson

The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility.

Freeman Dyson

Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.

Freeman Dyson

Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn't mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It's part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least.

Freeman Dyson

It's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe.

Freeman Dyson