Freeman Dyson

1923–2020 · theoretical physicist and mathematician

Topics: learning, creativity, mathematics, physics

• The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.

  — Freeman Dyson

• There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.

  — Freeman Dyson

• 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.

  — Freeman Dyson

• 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.

  — 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.

  — 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

• 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.

  — Freeman Dyson

• Fifty years ago Kurt Gödel... proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible. … I hope that the notion of a final statement of the laws of physics will prove as illusory as the notion of a formal decision process for all mathematics.

  — Freeman Dyson

• To talk about the end of science is just as foolish as to talk about the end of religion. Science and religion are both still close to their beginnings, with no ends in sight.

  — Freeman Dyson

• Science has as many competing styles as painting or poetry. The diversity of science also finds a parallel in the diversity of religion.

  — Freeman Dyson

• The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.

  — Freeman Dyson

• Astronomers have so far escaped the extreme specialization that has overtaken physicists. Telescopes are big, but they are not as complicated as accelerators. Observations with a big telescope can be carried out in hours rather than years.

  — Freeman Dyson

• There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions.

  — Freeman Dyson

• Science is not a monolithic body of doctrine. Science is a culture, constantly growing and changing.

  — Freeman Dyson

• The right way to ask the question is: How does the concept of a point fit into the logical structure of Euclid's geometry? ...It cannot be answered by a definition.

  — Freeman Dyson

• The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.

  — Freeman Dyson

• A point has no existence by itself. It exists only as a part of the pattern of relationships which constitute the geometry of Euclid.

  — Freeman Dyson

• Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

  — Freeman Dyson

• Nobody knows what dark matter is. It is another deep mystery waiting to be explored. We know only that it is there, and that it weighs more than the stuff that we can see.

  — Freeman Dyson

• Nature's imagination is always richer than ours.

  — Freeman Dyson