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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.

-Freeman Dyson

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In Desperation I Asked

Freeman Dyson

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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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.

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Characteristics

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

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

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

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Falling In Love

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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.

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Humanity Looks To Me Like A Magnificent Beginning But Not The Final Word.

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 Greatest Unsolved Mysteries Are The Mysteries Of Our Existence As Conscious Beings In A Small Corner Of A Vast Universe.

Unsolved Mysteries

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.

Things Are Always More Complicated Than Most People Believe.

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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.

...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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Intelligence May Indeed Be A Benign Influence Creating Isolated Groups Of Philosopher-kings Far Apart In The Heavens... On The Other Hand, Intelligence May Be A Cancer Of Purposeless Technological Exploitation, Sweeping Across A Galaxy As Irresistibly As It Has Swept Across Our Own Planet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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 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.

Committees Do Harm Merely By Existing.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everything In My Life Was Luck.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

If It Should Turn Out That The Whole Of Physical Reality Can Be Described By A Finite Set Of Equations, I Would Be Disappointed, I Would Feel That The Creator Had Been Uncharacteristically Lacking In Imagination.

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.

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

It Is Better To Be Wrong Than To Be Vague.

Our Thinking Is Permeated By Our Historical Myths

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

Medieval Europe

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 Biologists Have Essentially Been Pushed Aside. Al Gore's Just An Opportunist. The Person Who Is Really Responsible For This Overestimate Of Global Warming Is Jim Hansen. He Consistently Exaggerates All The Dangers.

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

I Think Science And Religion Should Be Separate.

Science And Religion

Do Not Imagine That You Have To Know Everything Before You Can Do Anything. My Own Best Work Was Done When I Was Most Ignorant.

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.

Nothing Is Boring If You Look At Carefully.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Science And Religion

The Ground Of Science Was Littered With The Corpses Of Dead Unified Theories.

Mathematics Is Really An Art, Not A Science.

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

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Most Of What We See In The Universe Is Dust.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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