Freeman Dyson

careful waste years preparing examination

“We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.”

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

science territory science fiction dream

“Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.”

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

public distorted science facts exploration mysteries

“The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.”

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

task science society conventional wron dream true

“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”

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

scientist idea original engineer design

“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.”

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

wrong vague

“It is better to be wrong than to be vague.”

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

human problem humor bewilderment

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

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

science uncertain exciting unknown fact

“The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting―because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress.”

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

essential carbon three reservoir trees soil

“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 (1923-2020)

scientist reward money glimpse beauty nature

“For many scientists less divinely gifted than Einstein, the chief reward for being a scientist is not the power and the money but the chance of catching a glimpse of the transcendent beauty of nature.”

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

beauty genome small gigabyte petabyte

“The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data...which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire living biosphere, that's the assemblage of 20 million species or so that constitute all the living creatures on the planet, and you have a genome for every species the total is still about one petabyte, that's a million gigabytes - that's still very small compared with Google or the Wikipedia and it's a database that you can easily put in a small room, easily transmit from one place to another. 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 (1923-2020)

progress science downward upward dogmatic

“The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science.”

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

knowledge handicap teaching mind box

“ Knowing too much is a great handicap. Especially if you’ve been teaching for some years, things get so fixed in your mind and it’s impossible to think outside the box”

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

CO2 computer climate-model political bureaucracy

"…the public perception of carbon dioxide has been dominated by the computer climate-model experts who designed the plan. The tribal group-thinking of that group of experts was amplified and reinforced by a supportive political bureaucracy."

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

CO2 climate change benefits

"The direct effects of carbon dioxide increase on plant growth and interspecific competition receive little attention. The plan is drawn up as if climatic change were the only serious effect of carbon dioxide on human activities. . .In a comparison of the non-climatic with the climatic effects of carbon dioxide, the nonclimatic effects may be:

1. more certain,

2. more immediate,

3. easier to observe,

4. potentially at least as serious.

… Our research plan should address these issues directly, not as a mere side-line to climatic studies."

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

scientist politician cave-children stamp lowly origin

Our scientists and politicians of the modern age evolved recently from the cave-children. They still, as Charles Darwin remarked about human beings in general, bear the indelible stamp of their lowly origin."

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

cultural evolution storytelling cave-fire scientist politician l

"Cultural evolution was centered for a hundred thousand years on tales told by elders to children sitting around the cave fire. That cave-fire evolution gave us brains that are wonderfully sensitive to fable and fantasy, but insensitive to facts and figures. To enable a tribe to prevail in the harsh world of predators and prey, it was helpful to have brains with strong emotional bonding to shared songs and stories. It was not helpful to have brains questioning whether the stories were true. Our scientists and politicians of the modern age evolved recently from the cave-children. They still, as Charles Darwin remarked about human beings in general, bear the indelible stamp of their lowly origin."

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

scientific question public competitive sport winning evidence tr

"Thinking about scientific questions is still presented to the public as a competitive sport with winners and losers. For players of the sport with public reputations to defend, it is more important to belong to a winning team than to examine the evidence."

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

science advance explore nature rebel heretics question authority

"Real advances in science require a different cultural tradition, with individuals who invent new tools to explore nature and are not afraid to question authority. Science driven by rebels and heretics searching for truth has made great progress in the last three centuries."

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

average temperature earth mesure ocean

"The average ground temperature of the Earth is impossible to measure since most of the Earth is ocean … So this average ground temperature is a fiction."

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)

vegetation climate model atmosphere

"Vegetation is really controlling what happens...whereas the emphasis in the climate models has always been on the atmosphere."

― Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)