Housing, Health Care, Education

“The poorer half of humanity needs cheap housing, cheap health care, and cheap education, accessible to everybody, with high quality and high aesthetic standards. The fundamental problem for human society in the next century is the mismatch between the three new waves of technology and the three basic needs of poor people. The gap between technology and needs is wide and growing wider. If technology continues along its present course, ignoring the needs of the poor and showering benefits upon the rich, the poor will sooner or later rebel against the tyranny of technology and turn to irrational and violent remedies. In the future, as in the past, the revolt of the poor is likely to impoverish rich and poor together.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

Three New Ages

“The nuclear arms race is over, but the ethical problems raised by nonmilitary technology remain. The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, driven by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

Ethics

“The widening gap between technology and human needs can only be filled by ethics. We have seen in the last thirty years many examples of the power of ethics. The worldwide environmental movement, basing its power on ethical persuasion, has scored many victories over industrial wealth and technological arrogance. The most spectacular victory of the environmentalists was the downfall of the nuclear industry in the United States and many other countries, first in the domain of nuclear power and more recently in the domain of weapons. It was the environmental movement that closed down factories for making nuclear weapons in the United States, from plutonium-producing Hanford to warhead-producing Rocky Flats. Ethics can be a force more powerful than politics and economics.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

Ethical Progress

“The ethical standards of scientists must change as the scope of the good and evil caused by science has changed. In the long run, as Haldane and Einstein said, ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

The Two Great Follies

“The cult of military obedience and the cult of weapons of mass destruction are the two great follies of the modern age.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

More Books

“Samuel Gompers was the founder and first president of the American Federation of Labor. He established in America the tradition of practical bargaining between labor and management which led to an era of growth and prosperity for labor unions. Now, seventy years after Gomper's death, the unions have dwindled, while his dreams-more books and fewer guns, more leisure and less greed, more schoolhouses and fewer jails-have been tacitly abandoned. In a society without social justice and with a free-market ideology, guns, greed, and jails are bound to win.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

Freeman Dyson

“The traditional respect which nations pay to military valor cannot be denied. As every country has a right to self-defense, every country has a right to give honor to its military leaders. But the honoring of military leaders brings deadly danger to mankind unless both the moral authority granted to them and the technical means at their disposal are strictly limited. Military power should never be confused with moral virtue, and military leaders should never be entrusted with weapons of unlimited destruction.”
― Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

Both Directions

“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.”

The Wreckers

“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.”
― Freeman Dyson

Our Fate

“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.”
― Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson

“The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.”
― Freeman Dyson

“It is better to be wrong than to be vague.”
― Freeman Dyson

“We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!”
― Freeman Dyson, From Eros to Gaia

Freeman Dyson

“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.”
― Freeman Dyson, From Eros to Gaia

Mind

“It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons.”
― Freeman Dyson

Our Task

“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.”
― Freeman Dyson

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.”
― Freeman Dyson

Pictorial

“The reason Dick's physics was so hard for ordinary people to grasp was that he did not use equations. The usual theoretical physics was done since the time of Newton was to begin by writing down some equations and then to work hard calculating solutions of the equations. This was the way Hans and Oppy and Julian Schwinger did physics. Dick just wrote down the solutions out of his head without ever writing down the equations. He had a physical picture of the way things happen, and the picture gave him the solutions directly with a minimum of calculation. It was no wonder that people who had spent their lives solving equations were baffled by him. Their minds were analytical; his was pictorial.”
― Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson

“It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be
approached without some humor and some bewilderment.”
― Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe

Exploring

“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.”
― Freeman Dyson

Hay Theory of History

“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.”
― Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions

Freeman Dyson

It's the birthday of physicist and writer Freeman Dyson (books by this author), born in Crawthorne Village, England (1923). While he was in his 20s, he made a huge contribution to science: He solved the central problem of quantum electrodynamics, a theory that describes how light and matter interact.

Dyson was on a Greyhound bus trip across America when the revelation came to him. He said: "As we were driving across Nebraska on the third day, something suddenly happened. For two weeks I had not thought about physics, and now it came bursting into my consciousness like an explosion." He sorted out all the different theories and came up with the reconciling equations and diagrams — all in his head, because he didn't have paper or a pencil on him.

When he was 55 years old, he published his first book, Disturbing the Universe (1979), in which he tries to "give to non-scientists a picture of the human passions, misadventures, and dreams that constitute the life of a scientist." He's written many books since then, including A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2007).

He said of scientific theories: "You sit quietly gestating them, for nine months or whatever the required time may be, and then one day they are out on their own, not belonging to you any more but to the whole community of scientists. Whatever it is that you produce, a baby, a book, or a theory, it is a piece of the magic of creation. You are producing something that you do not fully understand."