Freeman John Dyson FRS (b. December 15, 1923) is an English-born
American theoretical physicist and mathematician, known for his work in
quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear
engineering. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists. (Click
here for full Wikipedia article)
-----
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.
Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets,
by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and
biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the
twenty-first century.
Collective responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards.
Committees do harm merely by existing.
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.
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.
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.
If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter.
In trial and error, the error is the true essential.
It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be
approached without some humor and some bewilderment.
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.
It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.
Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to
their needs.
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.
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.
The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.
The military establishment is (...) an organization which seems to have
been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things
together which nobody in his right mind would do alone.
The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the
more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we
were coming.
The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People
who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally
don't have PhDs.
The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by
ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility.
The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to
raise people's hopes.
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.
The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life
are usually simple.
There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to
use.
We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something
ambitious!
-----
(December 15 is also the birthday of J.
Paul Getty.)
Categories:
Freeman Dyson,
Quotes of the day
Home
KGB on Bluesky
KGB on Substack
KGB Stuff
Commentwear
E-Mail KGB
Donate via PayPal
Older entries, Archives and Categories
Top of page
