Quote #8

In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, 'How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?' I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, 'Four.' He said, 'I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.' With that, the conversation was over.

More from Freeman Dyson

  1. The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.
  2. The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We have been searching for it for 50 years an…
  3. The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the p…
  4. There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.
  5. There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and con…
  6. If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough a…
  7. 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 …
  8. It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.

All Freeman Dyson quotes