The Other Dyson

Still trying to bend my head around some new thinking. Basically I have to write 50 700-800 word essays by Christmas. Yikes. Today it’s medical simulations and gerentology. Still, I’m learning lots and unearthing some great statistics and fantastic quotes. Here’s one from Freeman Dyson (Is he Esther Dyson’s dad or is that George?).

“More than 90 per cent of the technology that will affect our daily lives at the beginning of the 21st century has not been invented. This means that more innovations will be introduced in the next ten years than were produced throughout previous human history.”

Freeman Dyson, physicist and principal architect of the theory of quantum electrodynamics

2 thoughts on “The Other Dyson

  1. Love the guy. 🙂

    “My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.” – Freeman Dyson

  2. “Learning is remembering” who originally said that? I read it in Masilio Ficino’s letters, but will have to do some more digging.

    Having just finished a three-month contract looking into energy trends for the coming century, one thing that stood out was “we know 5% of what we will know in 50 years . . . . and if ‘learning is remembering’, what are we about to remember?

    It’s the Ouroboros, the snake eating its tail, the cycle of infinite return perhaps.

    One example that stands out for me is Newton & his theory of gravity, based on the inverse square law; he freely admitted [in his addendum to Principia] that he was ‘divinly inspired’ by the Pythagorean hermetic teaching of the ‘music of the spheres’, which describes the celestial world in terms of pitch and tone, at the root of which is the very same inverse square law. A Subtle teaching, hidden in metaphor, waiting to be ‘remembered’.

    Hidden in plain sight.

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