Freeman Dyson quotes - page 3

Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science. (Freeman Dyson)
You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind? View quote
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. View quote
Freeman Dyson
We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods. View quote
Freeman Dyson
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. View quote
Freeman Dyson
We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations. View quote
Freeman Dyson
Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth. View quote
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. View quote
Freeman Dyson
If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus. View quote
Freeman Dyson
Have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds. View quote
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)
It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear. View quote
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. View quote
Freeman Dyson
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. View quote
Freeman Dyson
I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain. View quote
Freeman Dyson
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. View quote
Freeman Dyson
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. View quote
Freeman Dyson
Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist. View quote
Freeman Dyson
Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs. View quote
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. View quote
Freeman Dyson
The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do. (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. View quote
Freeman Dyson
The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people. View quote
Freeman Dyson
The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes - as well as humans. It is not important that we didn't actually finish the human sequence yet. View quote
Freeman Dyson
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. View quote
Freeman Dyson