Freeman Dyson Quotes

What of the Wright boys in Dayton? Just around the corner they had a shop and did a bicycle business-and they wanted to fly for the sake of flying. They were Man the Seeker, Man on a Quest. Money was their last thought, their final absent-minded idea. They threw out a lot of old mistaken measurements and figured new ones that stood up when they took off and held the air and steered a course. They proved that "the faster you go the less power you need."

Grounding airplanes to cover your butt would never have let Orville or Wilbur change the world. We would still be spending weeks to cross the Atlantic to do business in London.

What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century.

We are ever on the threshold of new journeys and new discoveries. Can you imagine the excitement of the Wright brothers on the morning of that first flight? The anticipation of Jonas Salk as he analyzed the data that demonstrated a way to prevent polio?

In trying to make something new, half the undertaking lies in discovering whether it can be done. Once it has been established that it can, duplication is inevitable.

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

As I see it, whoever's doing the inventing is also doing most of the learning - and probably having most of the fun.

Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

If the Wright brothers hadn't put their lives on the line, we would not be flying around the world these days. So we need pioneers.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by things large and small. I wanted to know what made my watch tick, my radio play, and my house stand. I wanted to know who invented the bottle cap and who designed the bridge. I guess from early on I wanted to be an engineer.

That's the nice thing about doing research. Whatever you do is novel, so you always have this sense of novelty, even if you are only using a new gadget.

Innovation happens because there are people out there doing and trying a lot of different things.

I'm into creating something that I've never created before.

I have the instruments, ideas, technology, computer techniques. We try to create or see something, which has not been known before - just to discover something together. This is always my dream.

If people like Edison had waited to make every - or Ben Franklin or some of those people had waited to solve every problem on Earth before they did their research or before they were curious about doing something new, we'd never have made a lot of the progress we have.

With any new medium, the full power is only unearthed with experimentation.

In addition to encouraging failure, I would also encourage companies to broadly create a culture of innovation. That should mean more than just technology and invention; it should mean something millennials know well: Ingenuity.

You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.

America demands invention and innovation to succeed.

I'm sort of an experimenter; I thought it'd be interesting to play around and see what's there.

I consider myself an inventor first and an entrepreneur second. In real life, my hero is Thomas Edison. He was a great inventor, but also an outstanding entrepreneur who was able to sell his inventions to the masses. He didn't just develop the light bulb; he invented the entire electric grid and power distribution system.

I love finding and doing new things and trying stuff out; that's my favorite thing to do.

I think there's always room for more innovation and new things.