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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.
-Freeman Dyson
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The Idea That Global

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

Understanding the Quote: "the idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the..."

This quote by Freeman Dyson reflects deeply on the theme of ideas. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Ideas, Important, World, 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 ideas and important. 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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Topic
Ideas
Important
World
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It Makes Very Little Sense To Believe The Output Of The Climate Models.
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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.
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In The End It Is How You Fight, As Much As Why You Fight, That Makes Your Cause Good Or Bad.
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You Could Say Science Also Is An Art.
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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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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.
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There Is No Doubt That Parts Of The World Are Getting Warmer, But The Warming Is Not Global.
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Everything In My Life Was Luck. The Key To Having An Interesting Life Is To Always Say "yes" To Anything Crazy.
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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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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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We Have These Amazing Gifts Of Music And Mathematics And Painting And Olympic Running. I Mean, We're The Animal That Is Best Of All The Animals At Long-distance Running. Why? It Is Quite Amazing. Superfluous Gifts You Don't Really Need To Survive.
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The History Of Mathematics Is A History Of Horrendously Difficult Problems Being Solved By Young People Too Ignorant To Know That They Were Impossible.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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The Greatest Unsolved Mysteries Are The Mysteries Of Our Existence As Conscious Beings In A Small Corner Of A Vast Universe.
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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.
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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.
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Boiled Down To One Sentence, My Message Is The Unboundedness Of Life And The Unboundedness Of Human Destiny.
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For Me, Science Is Just A Bunch Of Tools - It's Like Playing The Violin.
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If You Start Out With A Tragic View Of Life, Then Anything Since Is Just A Bonus.
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Committees Do Harm Merely By Existing.
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A Model Is Such A Fascinating Toy That You Fall In Love With Your Creation.
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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.
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For Any Speculation Which Does Not At First Glance Look Crazy, There Is No Hope.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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If You Don't Have A Nasty Obituary You Probably Didn't Matter.
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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.
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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.
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I Have The Freedom To Do What I Want... Bright People To Talk To Every Day.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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 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.
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So Long As You Have Courage And A Sense Of Humor, It Is Never Too Late To Start Life Afresh.
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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.
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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.
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Co2 Is So Beneficial...it Would Be Crazy To Try To Reduce It
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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
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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.
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The Media Always Tries To Make Everything Into A Disaster, But It's Mostly Rubbish.
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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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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.
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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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The Universe In Some Sense Must Have Known That We Were Coming.
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The Glory Of Science Is To Imagine More Than We Can Prove.
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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
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Science Is Not A Collection Of Truths. It Is A Continuing Exploration Of Mysteries.
Mystery
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Continuing
I'm Prejudiced About Education Altogether. I Think It's Terribly Overrated.
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Overrated
Scepticism Is As Important For A Good Journalist As It Is For A Good Scientist.
Important
Scientist
Journalist
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.
Thinking
People
Giving
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.
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Damnation
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.
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Brain
Most Of What We See In The Universe Is Dust.
Dust
Universe
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.
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Butterfly
Thinking
Science Is My Territory, But Science Fiction Is The Landscape Of My Dreams.
Dream
Fiction
Landscape
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
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Way
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.
Moving
Technology
Space
It Is Characteristic Of All Deep Human Problems That They Are Not To Be Approached Without Some Humor And Some Bewilderment.
Humor
Problem
Characteristics
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
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Fiction
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.
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Choices
Mind
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
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.
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Tree
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.
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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.
Opportunity
Trying
Different
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.
Brother
Successful
Technology
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.
Book
Writing
People
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.
Long
Environmental
Global Warming
I Am Saying That All Predictions Concerning Climate Are Highly Uncertain.
Climate
Predictions
Uncertain
The Whole Point Of Science Is That Most Of It Is Uncertain. That's Why Science Is Exciting--because We Don't Know. Science Is All About Things We Don't Understand. The Public, Of Course, Imagines Science Is Just A Set Of Facts. But It's Not. Science Is A Process Of Exploring, Which Is Always Partial. We Explore, And We Find Out Things That We Understand. We Find Out Things We Thought We Understood Were Wrong. That's How It Makes Progress.
Progress
Facts
Imagine
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.
Discovery
Firsts
Size
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.
Mean
Science
Carbon Cycle
The Thing That Makes Me Most Optimistic Is China And India - Both Of Them Doing Well.
Optimistic
India
China
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
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.
Children
Mean
Simple
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.
Prayer
Hands
Giving
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
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.
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Impossible
Reviews
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
Beautiful Things
Courses
The Only Way To Improve The Chances For Finding Winners Is To Keep All The Choices Open And Try Them All.
Choices
Trying
Way
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.
People
Violin
Mathematics
Aviation Is The Branch Of Engineering That Is Least Forgiving Of Mistakes.
Mistake
Engineering
Forgiving
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
Some Of My Friends Like To Keep Science And Religion Together, But I Certainly Like To Keep Them Separate.
Together
Science And Religion
My Friends
The Public Knows That Human Beings Are Fallible. Only People Blinded By Ideology Fall Into The Trap Of Believing In Their Own Infallibility.
Believe
Fall
People
Things Are Always More Complicated Than Most People Believe.
Believe
People
Complicated
Almost Everything About The Universe Is Astounding.
Universe
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.
Horse
New York
Science
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.
War
Heart
Airplane
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.
Thinking
People
Culture
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
The Purpose Of Thinking About The Future Is Not To Predict It But To Raise People's Hopes.
Thinking
People
Purpose
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.
Crazy
Innovation
Confusing
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.
Path
Becoming
Computer
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.
War
Mean
Nuclear
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.
Country
Science
Technology
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 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.
Jobs
Numbers
Average
Everything In My Life Was Luck.
Luck
One Factor That Has Remained Constant Through All The Twists And Turns Of The History Of Physical Science Is The Decisive Importance Of The Mathematical Imagination.
Education
Science
Imagination
It's Better To Get Mugged Than To Live A Life Of Fear.
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.
Math
Ideas
People
The World Is Just - It's Wonderful When You Look At All The Detail. It's Just Amazing.
Details
Looks
World
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
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.
Crazy
May
Driven
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
Of Course, Long-distance Running Has To Do With The Fact That We're Hunters.
Running
Distance
Long
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.
Horse
Dark
Winter
Computer Models Of The Climate....[are] A Very Dubious Business If You Don't Have Good Inputs.
Dubious
Climate
Input
In The Future, A New Generation Of Artists Will Be Writing Genomes As Fluently As Blake And Byron Wrote Verses.
Writing
Artist
Generations
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
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
...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.
Real
Dust
Clouds
There Is No Way To Find The Best Design Except To Try Out As Many Designs As Possible And Discard The Failures.
Design
Trying
Way
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.
Strong
Jobs
Should Have
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
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
I Think We're Doing Pretty Well. It's Clear The Media, Of Course, Always Gives You The Bad News.
Thinking
Media
Giving
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
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
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
In Religion, You're Supposed To Be Somehow In Touch With Something Deep And Full Of Mysteries.
Mystery
Supposed To Be
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
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
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.
Experts
Facts
Honest
A Model Is Done When Nothing Else Can Be Taken Out.
Taken
Simplicity
Done
The Technologies That Raise The Fewest Ethical Problems Are Those That Work On A Human Scale, Brightening The Lives Of Individual People.
Technology
People
Problem
[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
That's What I Learned From World War Ii. Things Are Always More Complicated Than Most People Believe.
War
Believe
People
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.
Real
Roots
People
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.
Destiny
Space
Niche
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
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.
Mother
Years
Soul
It Is Better To Be Wrong Than To Be Vague.
Mindset
Vague
The Technologies Which Have Had The Most Profound Effects On Human Life Are Usually Simple.
Technology
Simple
Medieval Europe
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
We Do Not Need To Have An Agreed Set Of Goals Before We Do Something Ambitious!
Ambition
Goal
Ambitious
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.
Nature
Art
Philosophy
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.
Brain
Trying
Digital
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.
Old Things
Entrepreneur
Tools
I'm Happy That I've Raised Six Kids, And Not One Of Them Is A Ph.d.
Kids
Six
Raised
It's Us That's Really Amazing.
Really Amazing
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.
Life
Mother
Art
Most Of The Crackpot 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 The Great Innovation Appears, It Will Almost Certainly Be In A Muddled, Incomplete And Confusing Form. To The Discoverer Himself It Will Be Only Half-understood; To Everybody Else It Will Be A Mystery. For Any Speculation Which Does Not At First Glance Look Crazy, There Is No Hope.
Crazy
Science
Discovery
Ethical Progress Is The Only Cure For The Damage Done By Scientific Progress.
Progress
Done
Damage
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
The Pain Of Childbirth Is Not Remembered. It's The Child That's Remembered.
Children
Pain
Childbirth
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
The Ground Of Science Was Littered With The Corpses Of Dead Unified Theories.
Theory
Corpses
Unified
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
The Key To Having An Interesting Life Is To Always Say "yes" To Anything Crazy.
Crazy
Keys
Interesting
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
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
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