15 Quotes by George Dyson

Spring of 1955 found Johnny and Klári settled into a small but comfortable house in Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Johnny having made the journey from postdoctoral immigrant to a presidential appointment in just twenty-five years. The interlude in Washington promised to lead to even more productive years ahead. “I want to become independent of the regulated academic life,” von Neumann had written to Klári from Los Alamos in 1943—a goal that was finally within reach. It was not to be.

If you spend time alone in the wilderness, you get very attuned to living things.

Last time I checked, the digital universe was expanding at the rate of five trillion bits per second in storage and two trillion transistors per second on the processing side.

Alan Turing gave us a mathematical model of digital computing that has completely withstood the test of time. He gave us a very, very clear description that was truly prophetic.

Digital organisms, while not necessarily any more alive than a phone book, are strings of code that replicate and evolve over time. Digital codes are strings of binary digits - bits.

When you click on a link, you are replicating the string of code that it links to. Replication of code sequences isn't life, any more than replication of nucleotide sequences is, but we know that it sometimes leads to life.

The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good.

We could construct a machine that is more intelligent than we can understand. It's possible Google is that kind of thing already. It scales so fast.

I have had a Twitter account since the very beginning but have never used it: I haven't tweeted anything, and I haven't followed anyone.