Freeman Dyson
Freeman Dyson
Freeman John Dyson FRSis an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, known for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering. He is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Visitor of Ralston College, and a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists...
school mean kids
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.
teaching school mean
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.
children school views
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.
becomes beyond god mind passed scale
God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.
fun latin thinking
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.
eye thinking hands
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.
strong jobs should-have
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.
children mean simple
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.
people chinese different
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.
progress
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.
fate interesting hypothesis
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
giving mind earth
To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.
mystery conscious unsolved-mysteries
The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.
optimistic
The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well.