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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.

-Freeman Dyson

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The Question That Will

Freeman Dyson

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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.

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

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

Science And Religion

...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.

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.

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

[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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Thanks To The Discoveries Of Astronomers In The Twentieth Century, We Now Know That The Heat Death Is A Myth. The Heat Death Can Never Happen, And There Is No Paradox.

There Is 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.

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

We Should Try To Introduce Our Children To Science Today As A Rebellion Against Poverty And Ugliness And Militarism And Economic Injustice.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Unsolved Mysteries

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

It Is Better To Be Wrong Than To Be Vague.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

In The End It Is How You Fight, As Much As Why You Fight, That Makes Your Cause Good Or Bad.

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.

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.

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.

Most Of What We See In The Universe Is Dust.

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

Mathematics Is Really An Art, Not A Science.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It Is Characteristic Of All Deep Human Problems That They Are Not To Be Approached Without Some Humor And Some Bewilderment.

Characteristics

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The Besicovitch Style Is Architectural. He Builds Out Of Simply Elements A Delicate And Complicated Architectural Structure, Usually With A Hierarchical Plan, And Then, When The Building Is Finished, The Completed Structure Leads By Simple Arguments To An Unexpected Conclusion. Every Besicovitch Proof Is A Work Of Art, As Carefully Constructed As A Bach Fugue.

I 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.

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.

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.

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

Beautiful Things

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

You Could Say Science Also Is An Art.

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.

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.

Everything In My Life Was Luck.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Medieval Europe

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Have Felt It Myself. The Glitter Of Nuclear Weapons. It Is Irresistible If You Come To Them As A Scientist. To Feel It's There In Your Hands, To Release This Energy That Fuels The Stars, To Let It Do Your Bidding. To Perform These Miracles, To Lift A Million Tons Of Rock Into The Sky. It Is Something That Gives People An Illusion Of Illimitable Power And It Is, In Some Ways, Responsible For All Our Troubles - This, What You Might Call Technical Arrogance, That Overcomes People When They See What They Can Do With Their Minds.

No Matter How Far We Go Into The Future, There Will Always Be New Things Happening, New Information Coming In, New Worlds To Explore, A Constantly Expanding Domain Of Life, Consciousness, And Memory.

The 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.

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

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing Is Boring If You Look At Carefully.

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

The Progress Of Science Requires The Growth Of Understanding In Both Directions, Downward From The Whole To The Parts And Upward From The Parts To The Whole. A Reductionist Philosophy, Arbitrarily Proclaiming That The Growth Of Understanding Must Go Only In One Direction, Makes No Scientific Sense. Indeed, Dogmatic Philosophical Beliefs Of Any Kind Have No Place In Science.

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 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.

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

Lucky Individuals In Each Generation Find Technology Appropriate To Their Needs.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Of Course, The English Countryside Is Completely Artificial. It Was Naturally A Forest; They Chopped Down The Trees And Made It Into What It Is Now: Really A Beautiful Country.

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

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

Falling In Love

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.

I Grew Up In England And We Spent Most Of The Time On Latin And Greek And Very Little On Science, And I Think That Was Good Because It Meant We Didn't Get Turned Off. It Was... Science Was Something We Did For Fun And Not Because We Had To.

Things Are Always More Complicated Than Most People Believe.

Committees Do Harm Merely By Existing.

For Some Days I Quietly Worked Out In My Own Mind The Metaphysics Of Cosmic Unity. The More I Thought About It, The More Convinced I Became That It Was The Living Truth. It Was Logically Incontrovertible. It Provided For The First Time A Firm Foundation For Ethics. It Offered Mankind The Radical Change Of Heart And Mind That Was Our Only Hope Of Peace At A Time Of Desperate Danger. Only One Small Problem Remained. I Must Find A Way To Convert The World To My Way Of Thinking.

I Think The Biggest Misconception About Mathematics Is That Everybody Has To Learn It. That Seems To Be A Complete Mistake. All The Time Worrying About Pushing The Children And Getting Them To Be Mathematically Literate And All That Stuff. It's Terribly Hard On The Kids. It's Also Hard On The Teachers. And I Think It's Totally Useless. To Me, Mathematics Is Like Playing The Violin. Some People Can Do It - Others Can't. If You Don't Have It, Then There's No Point In Pretending.

I Think Science And Religion Should Be Separate.

Science And Religion

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

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

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.

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

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.

The Glory Of Science Is To Imagine More Than We Can Prove.

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

Almost Everything About The Universe Is Astounding.

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.

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.

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

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

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