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Freeman Dyson Freeman John Dyson FRS is a British-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum field theory, solid-state.

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Presentation on theme: "Freeman Dyson Freeman John Dyson FRS is a British-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum field theory, solid-state."— Presentation transcript:

1 Freeman Dyson Freeman John Dyson FRS is a British-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum field theory, solid-state physics, and nuclear engineering. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the more..more..

2 “ Freeman Dyson: 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. #Causes #Causes

3 “ Freeman Dyson: There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use. #Tools#Tools

4 “ Freeman Dyson:God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. #God#God

5 “ Freeman Dyson: 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. #Engineering#Engineering

6 “ Freeman Dyson: 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. #Space #Space

7 “ Freeman Dyson:The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming. #Architecture#Architecture

8 “ Freeman Dyson: 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#Technology

9 “ Freeman Dyson:The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires. #Names#Names

10 “ Freeman Dyson: It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear. #Fear#Fear

11 “ Freeman Dyson: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. #Philosophers and Philosophy#Philosophers and Philosophy

12 “ Freeman Dyson: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. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So 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. #Cities and City Life#Cities and City Life

13 “ Freeman Dyson: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. #Mathematics#Mathematics

14 “ Freeman Dyson:I 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. #Time and Time Management#Time and Time Management

15 “ Freeman Dyson: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#Marriage

16 “ Freeman Dyson:The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible. #Law and Lawyers#Law and Lawyers

17 “ Freeman Dyson: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. #Science Fiction#Science Fiction

18 “ Freeman Dyson: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. #Men#Men

19 “ Freeman Dyson: It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment. #Problems#Problems

20 Related Authors on iWise About iWise Building the worlds wisdom engine. Follow us to get a brilliant quote of the day. You can customize which authors you get quotes from at www.iwise.comwww.iwise.com Esther Dyson Steven Weinberg Richard P Feynman


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