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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.
-Freeman Dyson
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We Won't Really Understand

Freeman Dyson
...
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.

Understanding the Quote: "we won't really understand the brain until we can make models of..."

This quote by Freeman Dyson reflects deeply on the theme of brain. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Brain, Trying, Digital, 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 brain and trying. 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
Brain
Trying
Digital
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Biology Is Now Bigger Than Physics, As Measured By The Size Of Budgets, By The Size Of The Workforce, Or By The Output Of Major Discoveries; And Biology Is Likely To Remain The Biggest Part Of Science Through The Twenty-first Century.
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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.
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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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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.
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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. ... 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.
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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.
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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.
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I Think We're Doing Pretty Well. It's Clear The Media, Of Course, Always Gives You The Bad News.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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To Give Us Room To Explore The Varieties Of Mind And Body Into Which Our Genome Can Evolve, One Planet Is Not Enough.
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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.
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Computer Models Of The Climate....[are] A Very Dubious Business If You Don't Have Good Inputs.
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It Makes Very Little Sense To Believe The Output Of The Climate Models.
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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.
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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.
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Science Is Not A Collection Of Truths. It Is A Continuing Exploration Of Mysteries.
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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Some Of My Friends Like To Keep Science And Religion Together, But I Certainly Like To Keep Them Separate.
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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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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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I Think The Fact That Aldous Huxley Wrote Brave New World And Talked About Anthrax Bombs Probably Helped Because At Least We... People Had The Understanding Before The War Began That's Something We Didn't Want To Get Into.
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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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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.
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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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Technology Must Be Guided And Driven By Ethics If It Is To Do More Than Provide New Toys For The Rich.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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Giving
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.
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Hero
Science
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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Causes
Ends
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
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Real
World
Stuff
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Technology
Office
Racing
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
There Is No Doubt That Parts Of The World Are Getting Warmer, But The Warming Is Not Global.
Doubt
World
Global Warming
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.
Space
Brain
Patterns
The Purpose Of Thinking About The Future Is Not To Predict It But To Raise People's Hopes.
Thinking
People
Purpose
Vegetation Is Really Controlling What Happens...whereas The Emphasis In The Climate Models Has Always Been On The Atmosphere.
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Climate
Global Warming
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
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
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 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.
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[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.
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Thinking
Hands
For Me, Science Is Just A Bunch Of Tools - It's Like Playing The Violin.
Tools
Violin
Bunch
The Key To Having An Interesting Life Is To Always Say "yes" To Anything Crazy.
Crazy
Keys
Interesting
I'm Happy That I've Raised Six Kids, And Not One Of Them Is A Ph.d.
Kids
Six
Raised
The Marketplace Judges Technologies By Their Practical Effectiveness, By Whether They Succeed Or Fail To Do The Job They Are Designed To Do.
Jobs
Technology
Effectiveness
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
If You Start Out With A Tragic View Of Life, Then Anything Since Is Just A Bonus.
Views
Bonus
Tragic
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 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.
Christian
Europe
Ideas
The Bottom Line For Mathematicians Is That The Architecture Has To Be Right. In All The Mathematics That I Did, The Essential Point Was To Find The Right Architecture. It's Like Building A Bridge. Once The Main Lines Of The Structure Are Right, Then The Details Miraculously Fit. The Problem Is The Overall Design.
Math
Bridges
Design
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
The Only Way To Improve The Chances For Finding Winners Is To Keep All The Choices Open And Try Them All.
Choices
Trying
Way
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.
Jobs
People
Meals
The Great Advances In Science Usually Result From New Tools Rather Than From New Doctrines.
Science
Doctrine
Tools
The Laws Of Nature Are Constructed In Such A Way As To Make The Universe As Interesting As Possible.
Law
Interesting
Way
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.
Technology
Gambling
Damnation
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
The Technologies Which Have Had The Most Profound Effects On Human Life Are Usually Simple.
Technology
Simple
Medieval Europe
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
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
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
You Could Say Science Also Is An Art.
Art
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.
Thinking
People
Facts
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
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
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
It Is Better To Be Wrong Than To Be Vague.
Mindset
Vague
Scepticism Is As Important For A Good Journalist As It Is For A Good Scientist.
Important
Scientist
Journalist
Committees Do Harm Merely By Existing.
Harm
Committees
[john Wheeler] Rejuvenated General Relativity; He Made It An Experimental Subject And Took It Away From The Mathematicians
Made
Mathematician
Subjects
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.
Christian
Jesus
Good Luck
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
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
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
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
So Long As You Have Courage And A Sense Of Humor, It Is Never Too Late To Start Life Afresh.
Life
Courage
Humor
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
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
Humanity Looks To Me Like A Magnificent Beginning But Not The Final Word.
Humanity
Finals
Looks
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.
Thinking
People
Brain
There Is A Great Satisfaction In Building Good Tools For Other People To Use.
People
Tools
Use
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
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.
Science
Weather
Meteorology
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.
Running
Distance
Mean
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.
Engineering
Orchids
Snakes
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
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.
Media
People
Chinese
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
Technology Without Morality Is Barbarous; Morality Without Technology Is Impotent.
Technology
Morality
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
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
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
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
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
The Thing That Makes Me Most Optimistic Is China And India - Both Of Them Doing Well.
Optimistic
India
China
The Media Always Tries To Make Everything Into A Disaster, But It's Mostly Rubbish.
Media
Trying
Rubbish
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
Mathematics Is Really An Art, Not A Science.
Art
Mathematics
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.
Philosophy
Philosophical
One Direction
Of Course, Long-distance Running Has To Do With The Fact That We're Hunters.
Running
Distance
Long
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.
Adventure
Shame
Scientist
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
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
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
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 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
A Model Is Done When Nothing Else Can Be Taken Out.
Taken
Simplicity
Done
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
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 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.
Eye
Thinking
Hands
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.
Science
Imagination
Nomenclature
Science Is My Territory, But Science Fiction Is The Landscape Of My Dreams.
Dream
Fiction
Landscape
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.
Stars
Rocks
Hands
We Do Not Need To Have An Agreed Set Of Goals Before We Do Something Ambitious!
Ambition
Goal
Ambitious
Mind And Intelligence Are Woven Into The Fabric Of Our Universe In A Way That Altogether Surpasses Our Understanding.
Science
Reality
Understanding
We Must Be Careful Not To Discourage Our Twelve-year-olds By Making Them Waste The Best Years Of Their Lives Preparing For Examinations.
Education
Years
Best Year
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
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
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
Lucky Individuals In Each Generation Find Technology Appropriate To Their Needs.
Technology
Lucky
Needs
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
...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
It's Us That's Really Amazing.
Really Amazing
The Fact That The Climate Is Getting Warmer Doesn't Scare Me At All. There's No Reason Why One Should Be Scared.
Scare
Climate
Facts
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
I Am Saying That All Predictions Concerning Climate Are Highly Uncertain.
Climate
Predictions
Uncertain
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.
Heart
Thinking
Small Problems
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.
Art
Strong
Talking
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
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.
Teaching
School
Mean
The Ground Of Science Was Littered With The Corpses Of Dead Unified Theories.
Theory
Corpses
Unified
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
As Finite Creatures Who Think And Feel, We Can Create Islands Of Meaning In The Sea Of Information.
Thinking
Islands
Sea
Things Are Always More Complicated Than Most People Believe.
Believe
People
Complicated
For Any Speculation Which Does Not At First Glance Look Crazy, There Is No Hope.
Crazy
Doe
Looks
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
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
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 Universe In Some Sense Must Have Known That We Were Coming.
Fine Tuning
Known
Universe
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
The World Is Just - It's Wonderful When You Look At All The Detail. It's Just Amazing.
Details
Looks
World
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
The Glory Of Science Is To Imagine More Than We Can Prove.
Imagine
Glory
Prove
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.
Garden
People
Ramanujan
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
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
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.
Athletic
Enjoy
Prove
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.
Science
Details
Architecture
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
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.
Beautiful
Country
Tree
I Have The Freedom To Do What I Want... Bright People To Talk To Every Day.
People
Want
It Is Characteristic Of All Deep Human Problems That They Are Not To Be Approached Without Some Humor And Some Bewilderment.
Humor
Problem
Characteristics
We Simply Don't Know Yet What's Going To Happen To The Carbon In The Atmosphere.
Atmosphere
Global Warming
Carbon
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 Future, A New Generation Of Artists Will Be Writing Genomes As Fluently As Blake And Byron Wrote Verses.
Writing
Artist
Generations
Most Of What We See In The Universe Is Dust.
Dust
Universe
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
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
Younger People Have So Many Opportunities. I Don't See Any Pessimism Among Them.
Opportunity
People
Pessimism
It's Better To Get Mugged Than To Live A Life Of Fear.
Climate Change Is Part Of The Normal Order Of Things, And We Know It Was Happening Before Humans Came.
Order
Climate
Normal
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
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