Background Image

...

A Good Cause Can Become Bad If We Fight For It With Means That Are Indiscriminately Murderous. A Bad Cause Can Become Good If Enough People Fight For It In A Spirit Of Comradeship And Self-sacrifice. In The End It Is How You Fight, As Much As Why You Fight, That Makes Your Cause Good Or Bad.

-Freeman Dyson

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

A Good Cause Can

Freeman Dyson

...

A Good Cause Can Become Bad If We Fight For It With Means That Are Indiscriminately Murderous. A Bad Cause Can Become Good If Enough People Fight For It In A Spirit Of Comradeship And Self-sacrifice. In The End It Is How You Fight, As Much As Why You Fight, That Makes Your Cause Good Or Bad.

Views: 15300

Topic

More From Freeman Dyson

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 Think It's Much Better To Have Your Eyes Open, But On The Other Hand, Of Course It Can Do Harm If You Tell People Look, There's All These Terrible Things You Can Do And Then Some Idiot May Go Ahead And Do It.

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.

Co2 Is So Beneficial...it Would Be Crazy To Try To Reduce It

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.

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.

If We Want To Go To Space With Humans, That's For Fun Not For Science. Human Adventures In Space Are Just Sporting Events.

It Is In The Long Run Essential To The Growth Of Any New And High Civilization That Small Groups Of Men Can Escape From Their Neighbors And From Their Government, To Go And Live As They Please In The Wilderness. A Truly Isolated, Small, And Creative Society Will Never Again Be Possible On This Planet.

So Long As You Have Courage And A Sense Of Humor, It Is Never Too Late To Start Life Afresh.

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.

The Technologies Which Have Had The Most Profound Effects On Human Life Are Usually Simple.

Medieval Europe

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.

It Makes Very Little Sense To Believe The Output Of The Climate Models.

The Technologies Which Have Had The Most Profound Effects On Human Life Are Usually Simple. A Good Example Of A Simple Technology With Profound Historical Consequences Is Hay. ... It Was Hay That Allowed Populations To Grow And Civilizations To Flourish Among The Forests Of Northern Europe. Hay Moved The Greatness Of Rome To Paris And London, And Later To Berlin And Moscow And New York.

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.

Trouble Arises When Either Science Or Religion Claims Universal Jurisdiction, When Either Religious Dogma Or Scientific Dogma Claims To Be Infallible. Religious Creationists And Scientific Materialists Are Equally Dogmatic And Insensitive. By Their Arrogance They Bring Both Science And Religion Into Disrepute.

Progress In Science Is Often Built On Wrong Theories That Are Later Corrected. It Is Better To Be Wrong Than To Be Vague.

As Finite Creatures Who Think And Feel, We Can Create Islands Of Meaning In The Sea Of Information.

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.

I Think It's A Big Mistake To Decide Too Soon What You're Going To Do With Your Life.

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.

You Could Say Science Also Is An Art.

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.

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.

Mathematics Is Really An Art, Not A Science.

Unfortunately The Global Warming Hysteria, As I See It, Is Driven By Politics More Than By Science.

Vegetation Is Really Controlling What Happens...whereas The Emphasis In The Climate Models Has Always Been On The Atmosphere.

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.

You Have This World Of Mathematics, Which Is Very Real And Which Contains All Kinds Of Wonderful Stuff. And Then We Also Have The World Of Nature, Which Is Real, Too.

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

Scepticism Is As Important For A Good Journalist As It Is For A Good Scientist.

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.

To Give Us Room To Explore The Varieties Of Mind And Body Into Which Our Genome Can Evolve, One Planet Is Not Enough.

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.

Walking The Streets Of Tokyo With Hawking In His Wheelchair ... I Felt As If I Were Taking A Walk Through Galilee With Jesus Christ [as] Crowds Of Japanese Silently Streamed After Us, Stretching Out Their Hands To Touch Hawking's Wheelchair. ... The Crowds Had Streamed After Einstein [on Einstein's Visit To Japan In 1922] As They Streamed After Hawking Seventy Years Later. ... They Showed Exquisite Choice In Their Heroes. ... Somehow They Understood That Einstein And Hawking Were Not Just Great Scientists, But Great Human Beings.

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.

After Sketching His Program For The Scientific Revolution That He Foresaw, Bacon Ends His Account With A Prayer: "humbly We Pray That This Mind May Be Steadfast In Us, And That Through These Our Hands, And The Hands Of Others To Whom Thou Shalt Give The Same Spirit, Thou Wilt Vouchsafe To Endow The Human Family With New Mercies". That Is Still A Good Prayer For All Of Us As We Begin The Twenty-first Century.

Life Is Nature's Way To Give Mind Oportunities It Wouldn't Otherwise Had.

There Is Nothing So Big Nor So Crazy That One Out Of A Million Technological Societies May Not Feel Itself Driven To Do, Provided It Is Physically Possible.

I Think That What The Machines Can Do, Of Course, Is Wonderful, But It's Not The Same As What The Brain Can Do.

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.

I See A Bright Future For The Biotechnology Industry When It Follows The Path Of The Computer Industry, The Path That Von Neumann Failed To Foresee, Becoming Small And Domesticated Rather Than Big And Centralized.

The Technologies That Raise The Fewest Ethical Problems Are Those That Work On A Human Scale, Brightening The Lives Of Individual People.

A Model Is Done When Nothing Else Can Be Taken Out.

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.

Successful Technologies Often Begin As Hobbies. Jacques Cousteau Invented Scuba Diving Because He Enjoyed Exploring Caves. The Wright Brothers Invented Flying As A Relief From The Monotony Of Their Normal Business Of Selling And Repairing Bicycles.

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.

I'm Happy That I've Raised Six Kids, And Not One Of Them Is A Ph.d.

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 Do Not Need To Have An Agreed Set Of Goals Before We Do Something Ambitious!

The Laws Of Nature Are Constructed In Such A Way As To Make The Universe As Interesting As Possible.

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.

If You Want To Have A Program For Moving Out Into The Universe, You Have To Think In Centuries Not In Decades.

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.

In Religion, You're Supposed To Be Somehow In Touch With Something Deep And Full Of Mysteries.

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.

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.

It's Clear The Media, Of Course, Always Gives You The Bad News. And People Who Rely On The Media, Like Mr. Trump, Think That Everything Is A Disaster. The Media Always Tries To Make Everything Into A Disaster, But It's Mostly Rubbish. It's A Point Of Fact That We're Doing Extremely Well.

Keynes Was Chief Economic Adviser To The British Government And Largely Responsible For Keeping The British Economy Afloat At A Time When More Than Half Of Our Gross National Product, And All Of Our Foreign Exchange, Was Being Spent On The War. I Was Lucky To Be Present At One Of His Rare Appearances In Cambridge, When He Gave A Lecture With The Title "newton, The Man." Four Years Later He Died Of Heart Failure, Precipitated By Overwork And The Hardships Of Crossing The Atlantic Repeatedly In Slow Propeller-driven Airplanes Under Wartime Conditions.

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.

There Are Three Reasons, . . . Apart From Scientific Considerations, Mankind Needs To Travel In Space. The First . . . Is Garbage Disposal; We Need To Transfer Industrial Processes Into Space So That The Earth May Remain A Green And Pleasant Place For Our Grandchildren To Live In. The Second . . . To Escape Material Impoverishment: The Resources Of This Planet Are Finite, And We Shall Not Forego Forever The Abundance Of Solar Energy And Minerals And Living Space That Are Spread Out All Around Us. The Third . . . Our Spiritual Need For An Open Frontier.

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.

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.

The World Is Just - It's Wonderful When You Look At All The Detail. It's Just Amazing. Nothing Is Boring If You Look At It Carefully.

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.

Things Are Always More Complicated Than Most People Believe.

Most Of The Papers Which Are Submitted To The Physical Review Are Rejected, Not Because It Is Impossible To Understand Them, But Because It Is Possible. Those Which Are Impossible To Understand Are Usually Published.

When World War Ii Came Along, Which Was When I Was A Teenager, We All Expected We Would Have Anthrax Bombs And This Kind Of Stuff. We Thought It Would Be A Biological War. Fortunately It Wasn't And, But It's Because The Danger Is Still There And By Some Miracle We Escaped All That, So You Never Can Tell What It Going To Happen, But Biology Certainly Could Be Even Worse Than Physics And Chemistry.

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.

Mathematics Is Really An Art, Not A Science. You Could Say Science Also Is An Art. So I Would Say The Difference Is Something You Can't Really Describe - You Can Only Recognize. You Hear Somebody Playing The Violin, And It Was Fritz Kreisler Or It Was Somebody Else, And You Can Tell The Difference. It Is So In Almost Every Art. We Just Don't Understand Why It Is That There Are Just A Few People Who Are Just Completely Off The Scale And The Rest Of Them Are Just Mediocre. And We Don't Know Why. But I Say It's Certainly True Of Mathematics.

That's, Of Course, The Beautiful Thing About Science - That It's All About Things We Don't Understand, Not Just The Things We Do Understand.

Beautiful Things

I Am Saying That All Predictions Concerning Climate Are Highly Uncertain.

Ethical Progress Is The Only Cure For The Damage Done By Scientific Progress.

It's Better To Get Mugged Than To Live A Life Of Fear.

It's Us That's Really Amazing.

Science Was Blamed For All The Horrors Of World War I, Just As It's Blamed Today For Nuclear Weapons And Quite Rightly. I Mean World War I Was A Horrible War And It Was Mostly The Fault Of Science, So That Was In A Way A Very Bad Time For Science, But On The Other Hand We Were Winning All These Nobel Prizes.

The Thing That Makes Me Most Optimistic Is China And India - Both Of Them Doing Well.

All The Time Worrying About Pushing The Children And Getting Them To Be Mathematically Literate And All That Stuff. It's Terribly Hard On The Kids. It's Also Hard On The Teachers. And I Think It's Totally Useless.

The Public Knows That Human Beings Are Fallible. Only People Blinded By Ideology Fall Into The Trap Of Believing In Their Own Infallibility.

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.]

Technology Must Be Guided And Driven By Ethics If It Is To Do More Than Provide New Toys For The Rich.

[on Richard P. Feynman's Live Demonstration Of The Rigidity Of The O-rings When Cold That Doomed The Space Shuttle Challenger, Killing Seven Astronauts:] The Public Saw With Their Own Eyes How Science Is Done, How A Great Scientist Thinks With His Hands, How Nature Gives A Clear Answer When A Scientist Asks Her A Clear Question.

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.

I Don't Know, But I Think It's Quite Possible That The More Science You Teach Kids In School The More It Turns Them Off, So I Don't Know. I Mean You Never Can Tell Which Way It Will Go.

If You Start Out With A Tragic View Of Life, Then Anything Since Is Just A Bonus.

You Have This World Of Mathematics, Which Is Very Real And Which Contains All Kinds Of Wonderful Stuff. And Then We Also Have The World Of Nature, Which Is Real, Too. And That, By Some Miracle, 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.

I Have The Freedom To Do What I Want... Bright People To Talk To Every Day.

If You're In The Business World, That's What's Expected: You Should Go Bust And Then Start Again On Something Else. So It's A Much More Relaxed Kind Of A Culture. It's Also Competitive, But Not In Such A Vicious Way. I Think The Academic World Is Actually Much More Destructive Of Young People.

That's What I Learned From World War Ii. Things Are Always More Complicated Than Most People Believe.

I Grew Up In England At A Time When England Was Winning Nobel Prizes Right And Left. I Mean It Was Amazing How Many Nobel Prizes England Was Winning In Chemistry And Physics And Biology And All The Sciences And At That Time The Teaching Of Science In The Schools Was Really Lousy.

The Fact That The Climate Is Getting Warmer Doesn't Scare Me At All. There's No Reason Why One Should Be Scared.

For Me, Science Is Just A Bunch Of Tools - It's Like Playing The Violin. 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.

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 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.

Dropping Of The Atomic Bomb Was The Main Subject Of Conversation For Many Years And So People Had Very Strong Feelings About It On Both Sides And People Who Thought It Was The Greatest Thing They'd Ever Done And People Who Thought It Was Just An Unpleasant Job And People Who Thought They Should Have Never Done It At All, So There Were Opinions Of All Kinds.

Most Of What We See In The Universe Is Dust.

I Think Science And Religion Should Be Separate.

Science And Religion

All Stable Processes We Shall Predict. All Unstable Processes We Shall Control. Describing John Von Neumann's Aspiration For The Application Of Computers Sufficiently Large To Solve The Problems Of Meteorology, Despite The Sensitivity Of The Weather To Small Perturbations.

The Great Advances In Science Usually Result From New Tools Rather Than From New Doctrines.

We Simply Don't Know Yet What's Going To Happen To The Carbon In The Atmosphere.

I Think The Biggest Misconception About Mathematics Is That Everybody Has To Learn It. That Seems To Be A Complete Mistake. All The Time Worrying About Pushing The Children And Getting Them To Be Mathematically Literate And All That Stuff. It's Terribly Hard On The Kids. It's Also Hard On The Teachers. And I Think It's Totally Useless. 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.

I'm Prejudiced About Education Altogether. I Think It's Terribly Overrated.

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.

...the Computer Models Are Very Good At Solving Equations Of Fluid Dynamics But Very Bad At Describing The Real World. The Real World Is Full Of Things Like Clouds And Vegetation And Soil And Dust Which The Models Describe Very Poorly.

Everything In My Life Was Luck.

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.

The More I Examine The Universe And Study The Details Of Its Architecture, The More Evidence I Find That The Universe In Some Sense Must Have Known That We Were Coming.

I'm Prejudiced About Education Altogether. I Think It's Terribly Overrated. It Wastes A Tremendous Amount Of Time - Especially For Women, It's Particularly Badly Timed. If They're 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.

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?

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.

As We Look Out Into The Universe And Identify The Many Accidents Of Physics And Astronomy That Have Worked Together To Our Benefit, It Almost Seems As If The Universe Must In Some Sense Have Known That We Were Coming.

The Purpose Of Thinking About The Future Is Not To Predict It But To Raise People's Hopes.

I Had The Good Luck A Few Years Ago To Visit The Archeological Site Of Zippori In Israel ... I Could See Here Displayed The Greek Culture That Jesus Decisively Rejected, The Same Greek Culture That Infiltrated The Christian Religion Soon After His Death And Has Dominated Christianity Ever Since.

The Media Always Tries To Make Everything Into A Disaster, But It's Mostly Rubbish.

Technology Without Morality Is Barbarous; Morality Without Technology Is Impotent.

If You Don't Have A Nasty Obituary You Probably Didn't Matter.

Some Of My Friends Like To Keep Science And Religion Together, But I Certainly Like To Keep Them Separate.

Science And Religion

[john Wheeler] Rejuvenated General Relativity; He Made It An Experimental Subject And Took It Away From The Mathematicians

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.

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.

Theory Said One Thing And The Experiment Said Something Different, So That Was The Stimulus That Started Me Going, That There Was Something There To Be Explained, Which Wasn't Understood And To Try To See Why That Experiment Gave The Answer It Did, So It Was A Big Opportunity For A Young Student Starting To Have Actually An Experiment Which Contradicted The Theory, So That's Was My Chance To Understand That.

Science Is My Territory, But Science Fiction Is The Landscape Of My Dreams.

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.

There Is No Doubt That Parts Of The World Are Getting Warmer, But The Warming Is Not Global.

Science And Religion Are Two Windows That People Look Through, Trying To Understand The Big Universe Outside, Trying To Understand Why We Are Here. The Two Windows Give Different Views, But They Look Out At The Same Universe. Both Views Are One-sided, Neither Is Complete. Both Leave Out Essential Features Of The Real World. And Both Are Worthy Of Respect.

One Of The Memorable Moments Of My Life Was When Willard Libby Came To Princeton With A Little Jar Full Of Crystals Of Barium Xenate. A Stable Compound, Looking Like Common Salt, But Much Heavier. This Was The Magic Of Chemistry, To See Xenon Trapped Into A Crystal.

It Is Better To Be Wrong Than To Be Vague.

It's Not Going To Be Just Humans Colonizing Space, It's Going To Be Life Moving Out From The Earth, Moving It Into Its Kingdom. And The Kingdom Of Life, Of Course, Is Going To Be The Universe.

The Pain Of Childbirth Is Not Remembered. It's The Child That's Remembered.

The Fundamental Reason Why Carbon Dioxide In The Atmosphere Is Critically Important To Biology Is That There Is So Little Of It. A Field Of Corn Growing In Full Sunlight In The Middle Of The Day Uses Up All The Carbon Dioxide Within A Meter Of The Ground In About Five Minutes. If The Air Were Not Constantly Stirred By Convection Currents And Winds, The Corn Would Stop Growing.

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.

The History Of Mathematics Is A History Of Horrendously Difficult Problems Being Solved By Young People Too Ignorant To Know That They Were Impossible.

That's The Beautiful Thing About Science - That It's All About Things We Don't Understand, Not Just The Things We Do Understand.

Beautiful Things

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.

Plasma Seems To Have The Kinds Of Properties One Would Like For Life. It's Somewhat Like Liquid Water--unpredictable And Thus Able To Behave In An Enormously Complex Fashion. It Could Probably Carry As Much Information As Dna Does. It Has At Least The Potential For Organizing Itself In Interesting Ways.

Almost Everything About The Universe Is Astounding.

The Technologies Which Have Had The Most Profound Effects On Human Life Are Usually Simple. A Good Example Of A Simple Technology With Profound Historical Consequences Is Hay. Nobody Knows Who Invented Hay, The Idea Of Cutting Grass In The Autumn And Storing It In Large Enough Quantities To Keep Horses And Cows Alive Through The Winter. All We Know Is That The Technology Of Hay Was Unknown To The Roman Empire But Was Known To Every Village Of Medieval Europe. Like Many Other Crucially Important Technologies, Hay Emerged Anonymously During The So-called Dark Ages.

The Average Ground Temperature Of The Earth Is Impossible To Measure Since Most Of The Earth Is Ocean...so This Average Ground Temperature Is A Fiction.

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.

In The Long Run, The Only Solution I See To The Problem Of Diversity Is The Expansion Of Mankind Into The Universe By Means Of Green Technology... Green Technology Means We Do Not Live In Cans But Adapt Our Plants And Our Animals And Ourselves To Live Wild In The Universe As We Find It... When Life Invades A New Habitat, She Never Moves With A Single Species. She Comes With A Variety Of Species, And As Soon As She Is Established, Her Species Spread And Diversify Further. Our Spread Through The Galaxy Will Follow Her Ancient Pattern.

Science Is Not A Collection Of Truths. It Is A Continuing Exploration Of Mysteries.

The Great Question For Our Time Is, How To Make Sure That The Continuing Scientific Revolution Brings Benefits To Everybody Rather Than Widening The Gap Between Rich And Poor. To Lift Up Poor Countries, And Poor People In Rich Countries, From Poverty, To Give Them A Chance Of A Decent Life, Technology Is Not Enough. Technology Must Be Guided And Driven By Ethics If It Is To Do More Than Provide New Toys For The Rich.

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.

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.

Brave New World

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.

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.

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.

The Idea That God May Be Approached And Understood Through Intellectual Analysis Is Uniquely Christian... It Is Probably Not An Accident That Modern Science Grew Explosively In Christian Europe And Left The Rest Of The World Behind.

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 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.

Boiled Down To One Sentence, My Message Is The Unboundedness Of Life And The Unboundedness Of Human Destiny.

We Must Be Careful Not To Discourage Our Twelve-year-olds By Making Them Waste The Best Years Of Their Lives Preparing For Examinations.

There Is A Great Satisfaction In Building Good Tools For Other People To Use.

Nothing Is Boring If You Look At Carefully.

I Think The Biggest Misconception Is That Everybody Has To Learn Mathematics. That Seems To Be A Complete Mistake.

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.

There Is No Way To Find The Best Design Except To Try Out As Many Designs As Possible And Discard The Failures.

For Any Speculation Which Does Not At First Glance Look Crazy, There Is No Hope.

The Ph.d. System Was Designed For A Job In Academics. And It Works Really Well If You Really Want To Be An Academic, And The System Actually Works Quite Well. So For People Who Have The Gift And Like To Go Spend Their Lives As Scholars, It's Fine. But The Trouble Is That It's Become A Kind Of A Meal Ticket - You Can't Get A Job If You Don't Have A Ph.d.

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. But, In My View, This Whole Field Is Based On A Misconception. I Think The Brain Is Analog, Whereas The Machines Are Digital. They Really Are Different. So I Think That What The Machines Can Do, Of Course, Is Wonderful, But It's Not The Same As What The Brain Can Do.

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 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.

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.

Younger People Have So Many Opportunities. I Don't See Any Pessimism Among Them.

For Me, Science Is Just A Bunch Of Tools - It's Like Playing The Violin.

Aviation Is The Branch Of Engineering That Is Least Forgiving Of Mistakes.

Everything In My Life Was Luck. The Key To Having An Interesting Life Is To Always Say "yes" To Anything Crazy.

The Marketplace Judges Technologies By Their Practical Effectiveness, By Whether They Succeed Or Fail To Do The Job They Are Designed To Do.

Our Thinking Is Permeated By Our Historical Myths

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.

Of Course, Long-distance Running Has To Do With The Fact That We're Hunters.

Computer Models Of The Climate....[are] A Very Dubious Business If You Don't Have Good Inputs.

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.

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

The Idea That Global Warming Is The Most Important Problem Facing The World Is Total Nonsense And Is Doing A Lot Of Harm.

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.

A Model Is Such A Fascinating Toy That You Fall In Love With Your Creation.

Falling In Love

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.

The Key To Having An Interesting Life Is To Always Say "yes" To Anything Crazy.

The Only Way To Improve The Chances For Finding Winners Is To Keep All The Choices Open And Try Them All.

I Think We're Doing Pretty Well. It's Clear The Media, Of Course, Always Gives You The Bad News.

The Total Disorder In The Universe, As Measured By The Quantity That Physicists Call Entropy, Increases Steadily Over Time. Also, The Total Order In The Universe, As Measured By The Complexity And Permanence Of Organized Structures, Also Increases Steadily Over Time.

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.

It's As Great A Part Of The Human Adventure To Invent Things As To Understand Them. John Randall Wasn't A Great Scientist, But He Was A Great Inventor. There's Been Lots More Like Him, And It's A Shame They Don't Get Nobel Prizes.

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.

Mind And Intelligence Are Woven Into The Fabric Of Our Universe In A Way That Altogether Surpasses Our Understanding.

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.

And Somehow Mother Nature Manages To Create This Incredible Biosphere, To Create This Incredibly Rich Environment Of Animals And Plants With This Amazingly Small Amount Of Data.

The World Is Just - It's Wonderful When You Look At All The Detail. It's Just Amazing.

Committees Do Harm Merely By Existing.

In The Future, A New Generation Of Artists Will Be Writing Genomes As Fluently As Blake And Byron Wrote Verses.

Science And Religion Are, Of Course, Two Different Ways Of Looking At The Universe; And It's The Same Universe With Two Different Windows.

The Phd System Is The Real Root Of The Evil Of Academic Snobbery. People Who Have Phds Consider Themselves A Priesthood, And Inventors Generally Don't Have Phds.

From My Childhood It Has Been My Conviction That Men Would Reach The Planets In My Lifetime . . . This Conviction . . . Rests On Two Beliefs, One Scientific And One Political: (1) There Are More Things In Heaven And Earth Than Are Dreamed Of In Our Present-day Science. And We Shall Only Find Out What They Are If We Go Out And Look For Them. (2) It Is In The Long Run Essential To The Growth Of Any New And High Civilization That Small Groups Of People Can Escape From Their Neighbors And From Their Governments, To Go And Live As They Please In The Wilderness.

The Thing That Makes Me Most Optimistic Is China And India - Both Of Them Doing Well. 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.

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.

The Universe In Some Sense Must Have Known That We Were Coming.

I Like People Who Are Working On Practical Things And Who Are Working In Teams. It's Not So Important To Get The Glory. It's Much More Important To Get Something That Works. It's A Better Way To Live.

Climate Change Is Part Of The Normal Order Of Things, And We Know It Was Happening Before Humans Came.

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.

Trending Author

George A. Moore

Camilla Lackberg

Category