Freeman Dyson
We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.Collection: Science
I belonged to a small minority of boys who were lacking in physical strength and athletic prowess. ... We found our refuge in science. ... We learned that science is a revenge of victims against oppressors, that science is a territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred.Collection: Revenge
Most of what we see in the universe is dust.Collection: Dust
As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it soCollection: Fate
I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.Collection: Marriage
Sometimes we talked about the nature of the human soul and about the Cosmic Unity of souls that I had believed in so firmly when I was 15 years old. My mother did not like the phrase Cosmic Unity. It was too pretentious. She preferred to call it a world soul.Collection: Mother
For some days I quietly worked out in my own mind the metaphysics of Cosmic Unity. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was the living truth. It was logically incontrovertible. It provided for the first time a firm foundation for ethics. It offered mankind the radical change of heart and mind that was our only hope of peace at a time of desperate danger. Only one small problem remained. I must find a way to convert the world to my way of thinking.Collection: Heart
One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.Collection: Education
Intelligence may indeed be a benign influence creating isolated groups of philosopher-kings far apart in the heavens... On the other hand, intelligence may be a cancer of purposeless technological exploitation, sweeping across a galaxy as irresistibly as it has swept across our own planet.Collection: Kings
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 trueCollection: Dream
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.Collection: Discovery
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.Collection: Science
Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it's the same universe with two different windows.Collection: Two
The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well.Collection: Optimistic
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.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Media
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.Collection: Luck
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Beautiful
I think we're doing pretty well. It's clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news.Collection: Thinking
Everything in my life was luck.Collection: Luck
Some of my friends like to keep science and religion together, but I certainly like to keep them separate.Collection: Together
I think science and religion should be separate.Collection: Thinking
In religion, you're supposed to be somehow in touch with something deep and full of mysteries.Collection: Mystery
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.Collection: Play
That's the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.Collection: Beautiful
The Besicovitch style is architectural. He builds out of simply elements a delicate and complicated architectural structure, usually with a hierarchical plan, and then, when the building is finished, the completed structure leads by simple arguments to an unexpected conclusion. Every Besicovitch proof is a work of art, as carefully constructed as a Bach fugue.Collection: Beauty
The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories.Collection: Theory
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.Collection: Miracle
Life is nature's way to give mind oportunities it wouldn't otherwise had.Collection: Life
We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!Collection: Ambition
We do not know how much of the environmental change is due to human activities and how much [is due] to long-term natural processes over which we have no control.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Mean
Computer models of the climate....[are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs.Collection: Dubious
The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all.Collection: Choices
The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.Collection: Imagine
The average student emerges at the end of the Ph.D. program, already middle-aged, overspecialized, poorly prepared for the world outside, and almost unemployable except in a narrow area of specialization. Large numbers of students for whom the program is inappropriate are trapped in it, because the Ph.D. has become a union card required for entry into the scientific job market.Collection: Jobs
The key to having an interesting life is to always say "yes" to anything crazy.Collection: Crazy
Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.Collection: Dream
In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over.Collection: Cutting
For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin.Collection: Tools
Science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practise it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. ... Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours.Collection: Nature
We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.Collection: Children
The universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.Collection: Fine Tuning
The most revolutionary aspect of technology is its mobility. Anybody can learn it. It jumps easily over barriers of race and language. ... The new technology of microchips and computer software is learned much faster than the old technology of coal and iron. It took three generations of misery for the older industrial countries to master the technology of coal and iron. The new industrial countries of East Asia, South Korea, and Singapore and Taiwan, mastered the new technology and made the jump from poverty to wealth in a single generation.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Space
I'm happy that I've raised six kids, and not one of them is a Ph.D.Collection: Kids
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.Collection: Philosophy