Dyson Freeman Quotes

We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.

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.

Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.

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.

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

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.

It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.

The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.

The nonliving universe is as diverse and as dynamic as the living universe, and is also dominated by patterns of organization that are not yet understood.

If science ceases to be a rebellion against authority, then it does not deserve the talents of our brightest children.

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.

We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!

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

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.

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.

We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.” —Freeman Dyson

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.

To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.

Sanity is, in essence, nothing more than the ability to live in harmony with nature's laws.

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.

For many scientists less divinely gifted than Einstein,the chief reward for being a scientist is not the power and the money but the chance of catching a glimpse of the transcendent beauty of nature.

Nonviolence is often the path of wisdom, but not always. Love and passive resistance are wonderfully effective weapons against some kinds of tyranny, but not against all.

My message is that science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practice it.

Any society which idolizes soldiers is tainted with a collective insanity and is likely in the end to come to grief.

Freeman Dyson said: “It is characteristic of scientific life that it is easy when you have a problem to work on. The hard part is finding your problem.

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.

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.

The cult of military obedience and the cult of weapons of mass destruction are the two great follies of the modern age.

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.

I do not deny the power and the beauty of reductionist science, as exemplified in the axioms and theorems of abstract algebra....But I assert the equal power and beauty of constructive science as exemplified in Godel's construction of an undecidable proposition....

Science flourishes best when it uses freely all the tools at hand, unconstrained by preconceived notions of what science ought to be. Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours.

Much of the history of science, like the history of religion, is a history of struggles driven by power and money. And yet this is not the whole story. Genuine saints occasionally play an important role, both in religion and in science. Einstein was an important figure in the history of science, and he was a firm believer in transcendence. For Einstein, science as a way of escape from mundane reality was no pretense. For many scientists less divinely gifted than Einstein, the chief reward for being a scientist is not the power and the money but the chance of catching a glimpse of the transcendent beauty of nature.

The best lesson from the myths of Newton and Archimedes is to work passionately but to take breaks. Sitting under trees and relaxing in baths lets the mind wander and frees the subconscious to do work on our behalf. Freeman Dyson, a world-class physi- cist and author, agrees: “I think it’s very important to be idle...people who keep themselves busy all the time are generally not creative. So I am not ashamed of being idle.

The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data...which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire living biosphere, that's the assemblage of 20 million species or so that constitute all the living creatures on the planet, and you have a genome for every species the total is still about one petabyte, that's a million gigabytes - that's still very small compared with Google or the Wikipedia and it's a database that you can easily put in a small room, easily transmit from one place to another. 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.

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.

To my mind, the history of science is most illuminating when the frailties of human actors are put into juxtaposition with the transcendence of nature's laws.

my first recommendation to people in charge of science education is, more money for public libraries and museums. Public libraries and museums ought to be as common as schools.

Life had to invent death to evolve.

Today I discovered a little theorem which gave me some intense moments of pleasure. It is beautiful and fell into my hand like a jewel from the sky.

It is better to be wrong than to be vague. In trial and error, the error is the true essential. —FREEMAN DYSON

Physicist Freeman Dyson once explained that what’s often attributed to the supernatural, or magic, or miracles, is actually just basic math. In any normal person’s life, miracles should occur at the rate of roughly one per month: The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about 30,000 per day, or about a million per month. If the chance of a “miracle” is one in a million, we should therefore experience one per month, on average.

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.

We must regard science, then, from three points of view. First, it is the free activity of man's divine faculties of reason and imagination. Secondly, it is the answer of the few to the demands of the many for wealth, comfort and victory, gifts which it will grant only in exchange for peace, security and stagnation. Finally it is man's gradual conquest, first of space and time, the of matters as such, then of his own body and those of other living beings, and finally the subjugation of the dark and evil elements in his own soul.

When I was a boy in England long ago, people who traveled on trains with dogs had to pay for a dog ticket. The question arose whether I needed to buy a dog ticket when I was traveling with a tortoise. The conductor on the train gave me the answer: “Cats is dogs and rabbits is dogs but tortoises is insects and travel free according.

The mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson makes a related observation about human society: The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation. On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture. On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species. On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet. Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales. That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature. In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet. If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands.

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.

Numa sociedade sem justiça social e com uma ideologia de livre-mercado, as armas, a ambição e as cadeias estão fadadas a vencer.

It is important for long-range stability that peaceful countries be well armed and well organized in self-defense.

It is impossible to make real progress in technology without gambling.

Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but also performers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim.

purpose of model-building in the realm of the future is not to predit, but only to draw a rough sketch of the territory into which we might be moving.

The debacle of European pacifism has at least one clear lesson to teach us: pacifists, if they are to be effective in the modern world, must be as wholehearted and as brave as Gandhi.

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.

The craft of writing software will not become obsolete. And the craft of using soft ware creatively is flourishing even more than the craft of writing it. The availability of software and

The international community of scientists may help to abolish war by setting an example to the world of practical cooperation extending across barriers of nationality, language, and culture.

I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe is some sense must have known that we were coming

Gandhi's satyagraha was an effective weapon for a subject people to use against their oppressors, but his followers discarded it promptly as soon as they gained control of their own government and stood in the oppressors' shoes.

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.

Black holes were invented by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder in 1939. Starting from Einstein's theory of general relativity, Oppenheimer and Snyder found solutions of Einstein's equations that described what happens to a massive star when it has exhausted its supplies of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally and disappears from the visible universe, leaving behind only an intense gravitational field to mark its presence. The star remains in a state of permanent free fall, collapsing endlessly inward into the gravitational pit without ever reaching the bottom. This solution of Einstein's equations was profoundly novel. It has had enormous impact on the later development of astrophysics.

Some Western readers commonly use the Japanese word manga to mean serious comic-book literature. According to one of my Japanese friends, this usage is wrong. The word manga means “idle picture” and is used in Japan to describe collections of trivial comic-book stories. The correct word for serious comic-book literature is gekiga, meaning “dramatic picture.

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.

The primary difference between the classical layer and the quantum layer is that the classical layer deals with facts and the quantum layer deals with probabilities. In situations where classical laws are valid, we can predict the future by observing the past. In situations where quantum laws are valid, we can observe the past but we cannot predict the future. In the quantum layer, events are unpredictable.

A ciência trabalha para o mal quando seu efeito é proporcionar brinquedos para os ricos; trabalha para o bem quando seu efeito é satisfazer as necessidades dos pobres. O preço baixo é uma virtude essencial. A motocicleta trabalhou para o bem porque era tão barata que um professor primário podia comprá-la. A energia nuclear funcionou principalmente para o mal, porque permaneceu um brinquedo para governos ricos e empresas ricas.

The essence of Hilbert's program was to find a decision process that would operate on symbols in a purely mechanical fashion, without requiring any understanding of their meaning. Since mathematics was reduced to a collection of marks on paper, the decision process should concern itself only with the marks and not with the fallible human intuitions out of which the marks were reduced. In spite of the prolonged efforts of Hilbert and his disciples, the Entscheidungsproblem was never solved. Success was achieved only in highly restricted domains of mathematics, excluding all the deeper and more interesting concepts. Hilbert never gave up hope, but as the years went by his program became an exercise in formal logic having little connection with real mathematics. Finally, when Hilbert was seventy years old, Kurt Godel proved by a brilliant analysis that the Entscheindungsproblem as Hilbert formulated it cannot be solved. Godel proved that in any formulation of mathematics, including the rules of ordinary arithmetic, a formal process for separating statements into true and false cannot exist. He proved the stronger result which is now known as Godel's theorem, that in any formalization of mathematics including the rules of ordinary arithmetic there are meaningful arithmetical statements that cannot be proved true or false. Godel's theorem shows conclusively that in pure mathematics reductionism does not work. To decide whether a mathematical statement is true, it is not sufficient to reduce the statement to marks on paper and to study the behavior of the marks. Except in trivial cases, you can decide the truth of a statement only by studying its meaning and its context in the larger world of mathematical ideas.

Science in its everyday practice is much closer to art than to philosophy. When I look at Godel's proof of his undecidability theorem, I do not see a philosophical argument. The proof is a soaring piece of architecture, as unique and as lovely as Chartres Cathedral. Godel took Hilbert's formalized axioms of mathematics as his building blocks and built out of them a lofty structure of ideas into which he could finally insert his undecidable arithmetical statement as the keystone of the arch. The proof is a great work of art. It is a construction, not a reduction. It destroyed Hilbert's dream of reducing all mathematics to a few equations, and replaced it with a greater dream of mathematics as an endlessly growing realm of ideas. Godel proved that in mathematics the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. Every formalization of mathematics raises questions that reach beyond the limits of the formalism into unexplored territory.

I believe that we are here to some purpose, that the purpose has something to do with the future, and that it transcends altogether the limits of our present knowledge and understanding. If you like, you can call the transcendent purpose God. If it is God, it is a Socinian God, inherent in the universe and growing in power and knowledge as the universe unfolds. Our minds are not only expressions of its purpose but are also contributions to its growth. —Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions

In my opinion, the black hole is incomparably the most exciting and the most important consequence of general relativity. Black holes are the places in the universe where general relativity is decisive. But Einstein never acknowledged his brainchild. Einstein was not merely skeptical, he was actively hostile to the idea of black holes. He thought that the black hole solution was a blemish to be removed from his theory by a better mathematical formulation, not a consequence to be tested by observation. He never expressed the slightest enthusiasm for black holes, either as a concept or as a physical possibility. Oddly enough, Oppenheimer too in later life was uninterested in black holes, although in retrospect we can say that they were his most important contribution to science. The older Einstein and the older Oppenheimer were blind to the mathematical beauty of black holes, and indifferent to the question whether black boles actually exist. How did this blindness and this indifference come about?

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.

As scientists would discover after Einstein’s death, Schwarzschild’s odd theory was right. Stars could collapse and create such a phenomenon, and in fact they often did. In the 1960s, physicists such as Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, John Wheeler, Freeman Dyson, and Kip Thorne showed that this was indeed a feature of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, one that was very real. Wheeler dubbed them “black holes,” and they have been a feature of cosmology, as well as Star Trek episodes, ever since.3 Black holes have now been discovered all over the universe, including one at the center of our galaxy that is a few million times more massive than our sun. “Black holes are not rare, and they are not an accidental embellishment of our universe,” says Dyson. “They are the only places in the universe where Einstein’s theory of relativity shows its full power and glory. Here, and nowhere else, space and time lose their individuality and merge together in a sharply curved four-dimensional structure precisely delineated by Einstein’s equations.”4 Einstein

In Oppenheimer's view, it would be a waste of his precious time, or of mine, to concern ourselves with the details of particular solutions. This was how the philosophy of reductionism led Oppenheimer and Einstein astray. Since the only purpose of physics was to reduce the world of physical phenomena to a finite set of fundamental equations, the study of particular solutions such as black holes was an undesirable distraction from the general goal. Like Hilbert, they were not content to solve particular problems one at a time. They were entranced by the dream of solving all the basic problems at once. And as a result, they failed in their later years to solve any problems at all.

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.

It is a curious paradox that several of the greatest and most creative spirits in science, after achieving important discoveries by following their unfettered imaginations, were in their later years obsessed with reductionist philosophy and as a result became sterile. Hilbert was a prime example of this paradox. Einstein was another. Like Hilbert, Einstein did his great work up to the age of forty without any reductionist bias. His crowning achievement, the general relativistic theory of gravitation, grew out of a deep physical understanding of natural processes. Only at the very end of his ten-year struggle to understand gravitation did he reduce the outcome of his understanding to a finite set of field equations. But like Hilbert, as he grew older he concentrated his attention more and more on the formal properties of his equations, and he lost interest in the wider universe of ideas out of which the equations arose. His last twenty years were spent in a fruitless search for a set of equations that would unify the whole of physics, without paying attention to the rapidly proliferating experimental discoveries that any unified theory would finally have to explain. I do not need to say more about this tragic and well-known story of Einstein's lonely attempt to reduce physics to a finite set of marks on paper. His attempt failed as dismally as Hilbert's attempt to do the same thing with mathematics. I shall instead discuss another aspect of Einstein's later life, an aspect that has received less attention than his quest for the unified field equations: his extraordinary hostility to the idea of black holes.

When Planck introduced his quantum of action at the turn of the 20th century, he realized that this allowed for a new set of natural units. For example, the Planck time is the square root of Planck’s constant times the gravitational constant divided by the fifth power of the speed of light. It is the smallest unit of time anyone talks about, but is it a “time”? The problem is that these constants are just that. They are the same to a resting observer as to a moving one. But the time is not. I posed this as a “divinette” to my “coven,” and Freeman Dyson came up with a beautiful answer. He tried to construct a clock that would measure it. Using the quantum uncertainties, he showed that it would be consumed by a black hole of its own making. No measurement is possible. The Planck time ain’t a time—or it may be beyond time.

In the history of science it happens not infrequently that a reductionist approach leads to a spectacular success. Frequently the understanding of a complicated system as a whole is impossible without an understanding of its component parts. And sometimes the understanding of a whole field of science is suddenly advanced by the discover of a single basic equation. Thus it happened that the Schrodinger equation in 1926 and the Dirac equation in 1927 brought a miraculous order into the previously mysterious processes of atomic physics. The equations of Erwin Schrodinger and Paul Dirac were triumphs of reductionism. Bewildering complexities of chemistry and physics were reduced to two lines of algebraic symbols. These triumphs were in Oppenheimer's mind when he belittled his own discovery of black holes. Compared with the abstract beauty and simplicity of the Dirac equation, the black hole solution seemed to him ugly, complicated, and lacking in fundamental significance.

Toward the end of Feynman’s life, his conservative view of quantum science became unfashionable. The fashionable theorists reject his dualistic picture of nature, with the classical world and the quantum world existing side by side. They believe that only the quantum world is real, and the classical world must be explained as some kind of illusion arising out of quantum processes. They disagree about the way in which quantum laws should be interpreted. Their basic problem is to explain how a world of quantum probabilities can generate the illusions of classical certainty that we experience in our daily lives. Their various interpretations of quantum theory lead to competing philosophical speculations about the role of the observer in the description of nature. Feynman had no patience for such speculations. He said that nature tells us that both the quantum world and the classical world exist and are real. We do not understand precisely how they fit together. According to Feynman, the road to understanding is not to argue about philosophy but to continue exploring the facts of nature.

But it happens at least equally often in the history of science that the understanding of the component parts of a composite system is impossible without an understanding of the behavior of the system as a whole. And it often happens that the understanding of the mathematical nature of an equation is impossible without a detailed understanding of its solutions. The black hole is a case in point. One could say without exaggeration that Einstein's equations of general relativity were understood only at a very superficial level before the discover of the black hole. During the fifty years since the black hole was invented, a deep mathematical understanding of the geometrical structure of space-time has slowly emerged, with the black hole solution playing a fundamental role in the structure. 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.

For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past. 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. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information. A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in the famous story “The Library of Babel,” written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.§ Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe. Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition: We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

The black hole solution of Einstein's equations is also a work of art. The black hole is not as majestic as Godel's proof, but it has the essential features of a work of art: uniqueness, beauty, and unexpectedness. Oppenheimer and Snyder built out of Einstein's equations a structure that Einstein had never imagined. The idea of matter in permanent free fall was hidden in the equations, but nobody saw it until it was revealed in the Oppenheimer-Snyder solution. On a much more humble level, my own activities as a theoretical physicist have a similar quality. When I am working, I feel myself to be practicing a craft rather than following a method. When I did my most important piece of work as a young man, putting together the ideas of Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman to obtain a simplified version of quantum electrodynamics, I had consciously in mind a metaphor to describe what I was doing. The metaphor was bridge-building. Tomonaga and Schwinger had built solid foundations on the other side, and my job was to design and build the cantilevers reaching out over the water until they met in the middle. The metaphor was a good one. The bridge that I built is still serviceable and still carrying traffic forty years later. The same metaphor describes well the greater work of unification achieved by Stephen Weinberg and Abdus Salam when they bridged the gap between electrodynamics and the weak interactions. In each case, after the work of unification is done, the whole stands higher than the parts.

The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. 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. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions. Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. Science resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Scientist Freeman Dyson attempted to clarify this for us when he came up with the concept of temporal diversity. As he came to realize, the survival of a species depends on adaptation and learning on six distinct timescales. On the shortest, most immediate scale, species must exist from year to year. The unit of survival for this year-to-year existence is the individual life form. Over decades, the unit of survival is the family, whose multiple generations last much longer than any single individual’s life span. Over centuries, it’s the tribe or nation. Over millennia, it is an entire culture. Over tens of millennia, it is the species itself, slowly evolving or surrendering to an evolved competitor. And over eons, the unit of survival is “the whole web of life of our planet.”2

I do not feel like an alien in this universe. 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.’ Freeman Dyson24

كلما فحصت الكون ودرستُ تفاصيل هندسته, كلما عثرت على دليل بأن الكون كان يعرف بطريقة ما أننا قادمون.

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 we were coming.

It is better to be wrong than to be vague. —Freeman Dyson

In 1956, at the age of three, I was walking home with my father, physicist Freeman Dyson, from his office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, when I found a broken fan belt lying in the road. I asked my father what it was. “It’s a piece of the sun,” he said.

Galison uses critical opalescence as a metaphor for the merging of technology, science, and philosophy that happened in the minds of Poincare and Einstein in the spring of 1905. Poincare and Einstein were immersed in the technical tools of time signaling, but the tools by themselves did not lead them to their discoveries. They were immersed in the mathematical ideas of electrodynamics, but the ideas by themselves did not lead them to their discoveries. They were also immersed in the philosophy of space and time. Poincare had written a philosophical book, Science and Hypothesis, which Einstein studied, digging deep into the foundations of knowledge and criticizing the Newtonian notions of absolute space and time. But the philosophy by itself did not lead them to their discoveries. What was needed to give birth to the theory of relativity was a critical moment, when tools, ideas, and philosophical reflections jostled together and merged into a new way of thinking. Galison would like to put an end to the argument between Kuhnians and Galisonians. In this book he takes his position squarely in the middle: "Attending to moments of critical opalescence offers a way out of this endless oscillation between thinking of history as ultimately about ideas or fundamentally about material objects.

The moral of Gandhi's life and death is that pacifism as a political program is much more difficult to sustain than pacifism as a personal ethic. Being himself a leader of extraordinary charisma and skill, Gandhi was able to organize a whole people around a program of pacifism. He proved that a pacifist resistance movement can be sustained for thirty years and can be strong enough to defeat an empire. The subsequent history of India proved that political pacifism was not strong enough to survive the death of its leader and to withstand the temptations of power.

In contrast to Kuhn, Galison in his classic work Image and Logic, published in 1997, describes the history of particle physics as a history of tools rather than ideas. According to Image and Logic, the progress of science is tool-driven. The tools of particle physics are of two kinds, optical and electronic. The optical tools are devices such as cloud chambers, bubble chambers, and photographic emulsions, which display particle interactions visually by means of images. The images record the tracks of particles. An experienced experimenter can see at once from the image when a particle is doing something unexpected. Optical tools are more likely to lead to discoveries that are qualitatively new. On the other hand, electronic tools are better for answering quantitative questions. Electronic detectors such as the Geiger counters that measure radioactivity in the cellars of old houses are based on logic. They are programmed to ask simple questions each time they detect a particle, and to record whether the answers to the questions are yes or no. They can detect particle collisions as at rates of millions per second, sort them into yes's and no's, and count the number that answered yes and the number that answered no. The history of particle physics may be divided into two periods, the earlier period ending about 1980 when optical detectors and images were dominant, and the later period when electronic detectors and logic were dominant. Before the transition, science advanced by making qualitative discoveries of new particles and new relationships between particles. After the transition, with the zoo of known particles more or less complete, the science advanced by measuring their interactions with greater and greater precision. In both periods, before and after the transition, tools were the driving force of progress.

The Yahuda collection gives us an intimate view of Newton's religious thinking, which was as intense and idiosyncratic as his thinking about alchemy and mathematical physics. He saw clearly that there is no firm basis in scripture for the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity. He was a Unitarian, deducing from the evidence of scripture that God the Father reigns alone. There is one God and not three.

Galison uses the phrase "critical opalescence" to sum up the story of what happened in 1905 when relativity was discovered. Critical opalescence is a strikingly beautiful effect that is seen when water is heated to a temperature of 374 degrees Celsius under high pressure. 374 degrees is called the critical temperature of water. It is the temperature at which water turns continuously into steam without boiling. At the critical temperature and pressure, water and steam are indistinguishable. They are a single fluid, unable to make up its mind whether to be a gas or a liquid. In that critical state, the fluid is continually fluctuating between gas and liquid, and the fluctuations are seen visually as a multicolored sparkling. The sparkling is called opalescence because it is also seen in opal jewels which have a similar multicolored radiance.

Looking back upon this history, I disagree with Galison's conclusion. I do not see critical opalescence as a decisive factor in Einstein's victory. I see Poincare and Einstein equal in their grasp of contemporary technology, equal in their love of philosophical speculation, unequal only in their receptiveness to new ideas. Ideas were the decisive factor. Einstein made the big jump into the world of relativity because he was eager to throw out old ideas and bring in new ones. Poincare hesitated on the brink and never made the big jump. In this instance at least, Kuhn was right. The scientific revolution of 1905 was driven by ideas and not by tools.

When we look ahead to 2018, we should expect big steps forward in science to come once again from changes in style rather than from marginal improvements in technology.

Or, as the great physicist Freeman Dyson observed, ‘The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.

Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, called him ‘the most original mind of his generation’, while in its obituary The New York Times described him as ‘arguably the most brilliant, iconoclastic and influential of the postwar generation of theoretical physicists’.

A espécie humana tem uma tendência profundamente arraigada de demonstrar que os experts estão errados.

Duas vozes falam pelo futuro, a voz da ciência e a voz da religião. A ciência e a religião são dois grandes empreendimentos humanos, que perduram ao longo dos séculos e nos ligam a nossos descendentes. Sou um cientista e, ao tentar neste livro olhar para o futuro, falo com a voz da ciência. Descrevo o passado e o futuro conforme o ponto de vista científico que me é familiar. Mas não afirmo que a voz da ciência fale com uma autoridade singular e única. A religião tem, no mínimo, autoridade igual na definição do destino humano. A religião fica mais próxima do coração da natureza humana, e tem mais penetração do que a ciência. Como a natureza humana, a qual reflete. a religião é muitas vezes cruel e pervertida. Nas ocasiões em que a ciência atingiu poder igual ao poder da religião, também ela tornou-se cruel e pervertida.

I once attended a meeting of historians at which the disciples of Kuhn were presenting an extreme and exaggerated version of his views. Kuhn interrupted them by shouting from the back of the hall with overwhelming volume, "One thing you people need to understand: I am not a Kuhnian.

The seeds of Tolstoy's gospel of nonviolence fell mostly upon stony soil as they were carried all over the world, and nowhere was the soil stonier than in his native Russia.