He is a British-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum field theory, solid-state physics, astronomy, and nuclear engineering. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
His professional interests are in mathematics and astronomy. Among his many books are Disturbing the Universe, Infinite in All Directions Origins of Life, From Eros to Gaia, Imagined Worlds, and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet.
(1923 – )
– Freeman Dyson Quotes –
There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.
~ Freeman Dyson
Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
~ Freeman Dyson
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. There are no prima donnas in engineering.
~ 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?
~ 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 is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.
~ Freeman Dyson
It’s better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.
~ Freeman Dyson
The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.
~ Freeman Dyson
It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds.
~ Freeman Dyson
Since I am heretic, I am accustomed to being in the minority.
~ Freeman Dyson
There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans.
~ Freeman Dyson
When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories.
~ 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.
~ Freeman Dyson
The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.
~ Freeman Dyson
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.
~ Freeman Dyson
