John von Neumann Quotes

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

Obviously it's a statistics game.

I'm not too worried about stats and stuff like that.

Statistics are there to be broken.

I wish I could calculate my way to a bigger audience, but I don't think I'm smart enough. Actually, I don't think anyone is smart enough. Most calculations along those lines fail.

But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.

I learned I'm not a science writer. I'm not very good at describing how something is happening. I try to describe "So What?"

But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

The game of investing is one of making better predictions about the future than other people. How are you going to do that? One way is to limit your tries to areas of competence. If you try to predict the future of everything, you attempt too much.

One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality.

Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that.

Science is prediction, not explanation.

Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It's produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.

For if as scientists we seek simplicity, then obviously we try the simplest surviving theory first, and retreat from it only when it proves false. Not this course, but any other, requires explanation. If you want to go somewhere quickly, and several alternate routes are equally likely to be open, no one asks why you take the shortest. The simplest theory is to be chosen not because it is the most likely to be true but because it is scientifically the most rewarding among equally likely alternatives. We aim at simplicity and hope for truth.

People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong.

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?

Prove beyond reasonable doubt that the process of evolution (option 3 above, under known options) is the only possible way the observed phenomena could have come into existence.

If every negotiation is conducted in public, then the minute one person says, well, what if we try this, next thing you know, the interest groups have piled all in, and the political opponents have shot it to pieces.

She didn't say a work, and I gave up trying, because you couldn't hear either one of us over the shattering noise of hearts breaking and the looming shadow of the last word, the one we refused to say.

Never throw the first punch. If you have to throw the second, try to make sure they don't get up for a third.

President Obama's trying to work out a nuclear deal with Iran, and the Republicans are steamed. They got together and sent Iran a letter about the nuclear deal. They said if this doesn't work, by God, they're going to send Seth Rogen and James Franco.

I try my best to be a good person and be the best I can be.