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Wikipedia Summary for Freeman Dyson
Freeman John Dyson (15 December 1923 – 28 February 2020) was an English-American theoretical and mathematical physicist, mathematician, and statistician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and engineering. He was Professor Emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College, and a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Dyson originated several concepts that bear his name, such as Dyson's transform, a fundamental technique in additive number theory, which he developed as part of his proof of Mann's theorem; the Dyson tree, a hypothetical genetically engineered plant capable of growing in a comet; the Dyson series, a perturbative series where each term is represented by Feynman diagrams; the Dyson sphere, a thought experiment that attempts to explain how a space-faring civilization would meet its energy requirements with a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output; and Dyson's eternal intelligence, a means by which an immortal society of intelligent beings in an open universe could escape the prospect of the heat death of the universe by extending subjective time to infinity while expending only a finite amount of energy.
Dyson disagreed with the scientific consensus on climate change. He believed that some of the effects of increased CO2 levels are favourable and not taken into account by climate scientists, such as increased agricultural yield, and further that the positive benefits of CO2 likely outweigh the negative effects. He was skeptical about the simulation models used to predict climate change, arguing that political efforts to reduce causes of climate change distract from other global problems that should take priority. He also signed the World Climate Declaration entitled "There is No Climate Emergency".
We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes.
Nothing is boring if you look at carefully.
Sanity is, in essence, nothing more than the ability to live in harmony with nature's laws.
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.
Climate change is part of the normal order of things, and we know it was happening before humans came.
I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.
We won't really understand the brain until we can make models of it which are analog rather than digital, which nobody seems to be trying very much.
I think we're doing pretty well. It's clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news.
If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus.
I don't believe in technological determinism, especially not in biology and medicine. We have strong laws to keep doctors from monkeying around with humans that will remain in place. It's simply not true that everything that is technologically possible gets done.
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.
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.
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.
The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do.
I mean science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly.
There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global.
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.
It makes very little sense to believe the output of the climate models.
For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created.
I'm prejudiced about education altogether. I think it's terribly overrated.
I'm happy that I've raised six kids, and not one of them is a Ph.D.
I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.
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 so.
Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.
The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it's mostly rubbish.
Some things go better than you expected, other things go worse, so I'm... I think the only sensible thing is just to wait and see and what I'm doing when I'm writing books -- I'm not doing science so much anymore.
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.
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.
The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories.
Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all. There's no reason why one should be scared.
Nonviolence is often the path of wisdom, but not always. Love and passive resistance are wonderfully effective weapons against some kinds of tyranny, but not against all.
I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we're going to be outstripped by the machines.
I think it's a big mistake to decide too soon what you're going to do with your life.
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.
The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India -- both of them doing well.
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.
I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.
In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.
Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs.
Of course, the English countryside is completely artificial. It was naturally a forest; they chopped down the trees and made it into what it is now: really a beautiful country.
The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.
If the tools are bad, nature's voice is muffled. If the tools are good, nature will give us a clear answer to a clear question.
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.
The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines.
Mostly I'm just writing books for the public, and so I try to describe for the public what the choices are, what they might have to expect in the future and so by warning people ahead of time maybe you have an effect.
The analogies between science and art are very good as long as you are talking about the creation and the performance. The creation is certainly very analogous. The aesthetic pleasure of the craftsmanship of performance is also very strong in science.
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.
CO2 is so beneficial...it would be crazy to try to reduce it.
There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.
What the world needs is a small, compact, flexible fusion technology that could make electricity where and when it is needed. The existing fusion program is leading to a huge source of centralized power, at a price that nobody except a government can afford.
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.
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.
The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult
problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were
impossible.
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.
Life had to invent death to evolve.
Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word.
The universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.
Well germ warfare of course exists. There have been on a small scale... There have been, of course, a few people who got killed with anthrax right here in Princeton.
In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.
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.
To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.
Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.
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.
The seeds from Ramanujan's garden have been blowing on the wind and have been sprouting all over the landscape.
On the stimulating effects of Ramanujan's mathematical legacy.
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.
It's us that's really amazing.
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.
Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it's the same universe with two different windows.
Some of my friends like to keep science and religion together, but I certainly like to keep them separate.
Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.
Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of 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.
I grew up in England and we spent most of the time on Latin and Greek and very little on science, and I think that was good because it meant we didn't get turned off. It was... Science was something we did for fun and not because we had to.
The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.
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.
The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility.
I think the fact that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and talked about anthrax bombs probably helped because at least we... people had the understanding before the war began that's something we didn't want to get into.
In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.
No matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.
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.
When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in muddled, incomplete and confusing form. ... For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.
New directions in science are launched by new tools much more often than by new concepts. The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained.