Freeman Dyson
The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing.Collection: Air
Do not imagine that you have to know everything before you can do anything. My own best work was done when I was most ignorant.Collection: Ignorant
As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.Collection: Together
Almost everything about the universe is astounding. I think the most amazing thing is how gifted we are - we are only monkeys who came down from the trees just recently. We have these amazing gifts of music and mathematics and painting and Olympic running.Collection: Running
Committees do harm merely by existing.Collection: Harm
Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent.Collection: Technology
Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.Collection: Inspirational
Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute.Collection: Religious
CO2 is so beneficial...it would be crazy to try to reduce itCollection: Crazy
Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe is also weird, with its laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it passes beyond the scale of our comprehension.Collection: Law
The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it's mostly rubbish.Collection: Media
Everything in my life was luck. The key to having an interesting life is to always say "yes" to anything crazy.Collection: Crazy
To me, mathematics is like playing the violin. Some people can do it - others can't. If you don't have it, then there's no point in pretending.Collection: People
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.Collection: Jesus
It's clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news. And people who rely on the media, like Mr. Trump, think that everything is a disaster. The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it's mostly rubbish. It's a point of fact that we're doing extremely well.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Mother
I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence.Collection: Eye
I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.Collection: Thinking
I think the biggest misconception about mathematics is that everybody has to learn it. That seems to be a complete mistake. 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. To me, mathematics is like playing the violin. Some people can do it - others can't. If you don't have it, then there's no point in pretending.Collection: Teacher
For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.Collection: Crazy
The great question for our time is, how to make sure that the continuing scientific revolution brings benefits to everybody rather than widening the gap between rich and poor. To lift up poor countries, and poor people in rich countries, from poverty, to give them a chance of a decent life, technology is not enough. Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.Collection: Country
Things are always more complicated than most people believe.Collection: Believe
When World War II came along, which was when I was a teenager, we all expected we would have anthrax bombs and this kind of stuff. We thought it would be a biological war. Fortunately it wasn't and, but it's because the danger is still there and by some miracle we escaped all that, so you never can tell what it going to happen, but biology certainly could be even worse than physics and chemistry.Collection: War
[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematiciansCollection: Made
If women are 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.Collection: Years
Almost everything about the universe is astounding.Collection: Universe
I'm prejudiced about education altogether. I think it's terribly overrated.Collection: Thinking
I grew up in England at a time when England was winning Nobel Prizes right and left. I mean it was amazing how many Nobel Prizes England was winning in chemistry and physics and biology and all the sciences and at that time the teaching of science in the schools was really lousy.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Math
The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.Collection: Mystery
It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values.Collection: Experts
The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We have been searching for it for 50 years and found nothing. That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless. We are only now developing the tools to make our searches efficient and far-reaching, as optical and radio detection and data processing move forward.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Xenon
If we want to go to space with humans, that's for fun not for science. Human adventures in space are just sporting events.Collection: Fun
There is nothing so big nor so crazy that one out of a million technological societies may not feel itself driven to do, provided it is physically possible.Collection: Crazy
We simply don't know yet what's going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere.Collection: Atmosphere
Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.Collection: Technology
To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.Collection: Giving
Most of the 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.Collection: Paper
That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.Collection: Garden
Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Passion
[On Richard P. Feynman's live demonstration of the rigidity of the O-rings when cold that doomed the space shuttle Challenger, killing seven astronauts:] The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.Collection: Eye
From my childhood it has been my conviction that men would reach the planets in my lifetime . . . this conviction . . . rests on two beliefs, one scientific and one political: (1) there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our present-day science. And we shall only find out what they are if we go out and look for them. (2) it is in the long run essential to the growth of any new and high civilization that small groups of people can escape from their neighbors and from their governments, to go and live as they please in the wilderness.Collection: Running
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. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages.Collection: Horse
If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.Collection: Moving