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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.
-Freeman Dyson
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Progress In Science Is

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.

Understanding the Quote: "progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later..."

This quote by Freeman Dyson reflects deeply on the theme of progress. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Progress, Theory, Built, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Freeman Dyson interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson is celebrated for insightful thoughts on progress and theory. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Progress
Theory
Built
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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.
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It Is Better To Be Wrong Than To Be Vague.
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The Fact That The Climate Is Getting Warmer Doesn't Scare Me At All. There's No Reason Why One Should Be Scared.
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Most Of What We See In The Universe Is Dust.
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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. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I Think It's A Big Mistake To Decide Too Soon What You're Going To Do With Your Life.
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Dream
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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.
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Thinking
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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.
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Mean
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Global Warming
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.
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Heart
Airplane
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.
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London
Thames
I Think That What The Machines Can Do, Of Course, Is Wonderful, But It's Not The Same As What The Brain Can Do.
Thinking
Brain
Machines
Younger People Have So Many Opportunities. I Don't See Any Pessimism Among Them.
Opportunity
People
Pessimism
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.
Science
Ideas
Engineering
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.
Optimistic
Progress
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.
Ocean
Average
Fiction
Technology Without Morality Is Barbarous; Morality Without Technology Is Impotent.
Technology
Morality
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.
Animal
Important
Tools
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.
Fashion
Science
Dna
Climate Change Is Part Of The Normal Order Of Things, And We Know It Was Happening Before Humans Came.
Order
Climate
Normal
We Should Try To Introduce Our Children To Science Today As A Rebellion Against Poverty And Ugliness And Militarism And Economic Injustice.
Children
Trying
Today
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.
Miracle
Done
Different
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.
School
Mean
Kids
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.
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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.
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Ideas
People
Science And Religion Are, Of Course, Two Different Ways Of Looking At The Universe; And It's The Same Universe With Two Different Windows.
Two
Different
Way
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.
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Becoming
Computer
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.
Ocean
Fall
Mean
Everything In My Life Was Luck. The Key To Having An Interesting Life Is To Always Say "yes" To Anything Crazy.
Crazy
Interesting
Luck
Mathematics Is Really An Art, Not A Science.
Art
Mathematics
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
Fate
Interesting
Hypothesis
To Give Us Room To Explore The Varieties Of Mind And Body Into Which Our Genome Can Evolve, One Planet Is Not Enough.
Giving
Mind
Body
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.
Spiritual
Moon
Grandchildren
It Makes Very Little Sense To Believe The Output Of The Climate Models.
Believe
Climate
Littles
Our Thinking Is Permeated By Our Historical Myths
Thinking
Historical
Myth
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.
Teacher
Children
Kids
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.
Als
Global Warming
Opportunist
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.
Xenon
Memorable
Science
Co2 Is So Beneficial...it Would Be Crazy To Try To Reduce It
Crazy
Trying
Would Be
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.
Real
Science
Views
I'm Prejudiced About Education Altogether. I Think It's Terribly Overrated.
Thinking
Overrated
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.
Science
Ideas
Trying
[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.
Eye
Thinking
Hands
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.
Play
Athletic
Olympics
I Think Science And Religion Should Be Separate.
Thinking
Should
Science And Religion
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.
Science
Carbon Cycle
Tree
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.
Mean
Math
Justice
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
Dream
Tasks
Unpredictable
It's Us That's Really Amazing.
Really Amazing
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.
Thinking
People
Progress
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.
Thinking
Age
Conflict
If You Want To Have A Program For Moving Out Into The Universe, You Have To Think In Centuries Not In Decades.
Moving
Thinking
Moon
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.
Climate
Gaps
Global Warming
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.
Passion
Science
Thinking
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.
Years
Progress
India
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.
Reality
Imagination
Would Be
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.
People
Warfare
Germs
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.
Mean
Fighting
Sacrifice
Unfortunately The Global Warming Hysteria, As I See It, Is Driven By Politics More Than By Science.
Hysteria
Global Warming
Driven
If We Want To Go To Space With Humans, That's For Fun Not For Science. Human Adventures In Space Are Just Sporting Events.
Fun
Adventure
Space
There Is A Great Satisfaction In Building Good Tools For Other People To Use.
People
Tools
Use
It's Better To Get Mugged Than To Live A Life Of Fear.
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?
Wise
Thinking
Fog
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.
Eye
Years
One Day
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.
Cutting
Agreement
Elephants
You Could Say Science Also Is An Art.
Art
The Great Advances In Science Usually Result From New Tools Rather Than From New Doctrines.
Science
Doctrine
Tools
Progress In Science Is Often Built On Wrong Theories That Are Later Corrected. It Is Better To Be Wrong Than To Be Vague.
Progress
Theory
Built
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.
Majority
Minorities
Global Warming
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.
Science
Voice
Giving
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.
Paper
Impossible
Reviews
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
Beautiful Things
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.]
Garden
Wind
Legacy
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.
Mother
Animal
Data
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.
Running
Moving
Mean
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.
Technology
Government
Fusion
The Universe In Some Sense Must Have Known That We Were Coming.
Fine Tuning
Known
Universe
Humanity Looks To Me Like A Magnificent Beginning But Not The Final Word.
Humanity
Finals
Looks
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.
Running
Moon
Men
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.
Children
School
Views
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.
Years
Age
Finishing
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.
Giving
World
Different
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.
Miracle
Done
Different
The Media Always Tries To Make Everything Into A Disaster, But It's Mostly Rubbish.
Media
Trying
Rubbish
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.
Together
Looks
Benefits
The Ground Of Science Was Littered With The Corpses Of Dead Unified Theories.
Theory
Corpses
Unified
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.
Revenge
Science
Boys
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.
War
Teenager
Miracle
I Am Saying That All Predictions Concerning Climate Are Highly Uncertain.
Climate
Predictions
Uncertain
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.
Twenties
Firsts
Physics
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.
Teacher
Children
Mistake
I Have The Freedom To Do What I Want... Bright People To Talk To Every Day.
People
Want
If You Don't Have A Nasty Obituary You Probably Didn't Matter.
Matter
Nasty
Ifs
Atoms Are Weird Stuff, Behaving Like Active Agents Rather Than Inert Substances. They Make Unpredictable Choices Between Alternative Possibilities According To The Laws Of Quantum Mechanics. It Appears That Mind, As Manifested By The Capacity To Make Choices, Is To Some Extent Inherent In Every Atom. The Universe Is Also Weird, With Its Laws Of Nature That Make It Hospitable To The Growth Of Mind. I Do Not Make Any Clear Distinction Between Mind And God. God Is What Mind Becomes When It Passes Beyond The Scale Of Our Comprehension.
Law
Choices
Mind
The Greatest Unsolved Mysteries Are The Mysteries Of Our Existence As Conscious Beings In A Small Corner Of A Vast Universe.
Mystery
Conscious
Unsolved Mysteries
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.
Mind
Religion
Scales
The Thing That Makes Me Most Optimistic Is China And India - Both Of Them Doing Well.
Optimistic
India
China
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.
Real
World
Stuff
Vegetation Is Really Controlling What Happens...whereas The Emphasis In The Climate Models Has Always Been On The Atmosphere.
Atmosphere
Climate
Global Warming
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.
Ignorant
Done
Imagine
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.
Marriage
Divorce
Math
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