While the name Freeman Dyson may be unfamiliar to you, it is a well-known one in the scientific community. Dyson was an American physicist, born in the UK, who made countless contributions in the fields of nuclear engineering, astronomy, physics, mathematics, and quantum mechanics. He was known not only for his intellectual genius but for his steadfastness, his dedication, and his dignified humility. He also made a habit of questioning everything and pushing the boundaries of the known and unknown.
He gained fame as a professor emeritus at Princeton, as well as for being one of the few scientists in the world that neither wanted nor needed a Ph.D. One of his most famous works, "The Scientist as a Rebel", consisting of a collection of essays and stories, he looks at the world of science from a broad philosophical perspective and even searches for the correlation between religion and science. On 28th of February, 2020, the scientific community was shaken by the loss of this insightful and rebellious mind. His contributions, however, will continue to inspire budding scientists world over, and these words of wisdom are sure to inspire the rest of us.
1. On the role of science
“If science ceases to be a rebellion against authority, then it does not deserve the talents of our brightest children.”
2. On the need for more
“To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.”
3. On glory
“The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.”
4. On the future
“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.”
5. On ambition
“We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!”
6. On the inevitability of comedy and confusion
“It is a characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.”
7. On the universes
“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.”
8. On boldness
“It is better to be wrong than to be vague.”
9. On further examination
“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.”
10. On originality
“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.”
11. On instinct
"The human species has a deeply ingrained tendency to demonstrate that experts are wrong."
12. On vision
“The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists.”
13. On evolution
“Life had to invent death to evolve.”
14. On mystery
“In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries.”
15. On 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.”
Bonus Video: The Story of Freeman Dyson
