Freeman Dyson
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| Born | December 15, 1923 Crowthorne, Berkshire, England <tr><th>Residence</th><td>Image:Flag of the United States.svg USA</td></tr><tr><th>Nationality</th><td>Image:Flag of the United Kingdom.svg British (pre-1957) </br> Image:Flag of the United States.svg American (post-1957)</td></tr><tr><th>Field</th><td>Physicist</td></tr><tr><th>Institution</th><td>Royal Air Force</br>Institute for Advanced Study</br>Cornell University</td></tr><tr><th>Alma Mater</th><td>University of Cambridge</td></tr><tr><th>Academic Advisor</th><td>None</td></tr><tr><th>Known for</th><td>Dyson sphere</br>Dyson operator</td></tr><tr><th>Notable Prizes</th><td>Templeton Prize (2000)</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">He is notably the son of George Dyson (composer), and father of Esther Dyson and George Dyson (science historian).</td></tr> |
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Freeman John Dyson (born December 15, 1923) is an English-born physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum mechanics, nuclear weapons design and policy, and for his serious theorizing in futurism and science fiction concepts, including the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He is a lifelong opponent of nationalism, and proponent of nuclear disarmament and international cooperation. Prof. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.<ref>http://www.thebulletin.org</ref>.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Personal
He has six children. One daughter is Esther Dyson, the noted digital technology consultant. His son is the historian of technology George Dyson, one of whose books is Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957-1965. His wife, Imme Dyson, is an accomplished masters runner. Dyson's father was the renowned English composer George Dyson. Despite sharing a last name, he is not related to early 20th-century astronomer Frank Watson Dyson. However, as a small boy Freeman Dyson was aware of Frank Watson Dyson; Freeman credits the popularity of someone with the same last name with inadvertently helping to spark his interest in science. Dyson received a Sc.D. from Bates College in 1990. A boy in Tonganoxie, Kansas, USA, was named Dyson Felty in honor of Freeman Dyson (February 12 2000); when informed of this, Freeman Dyson unofficially adopted Dyson Felty as his godson.
[edit] Career
Dyson worked as an analyst for British Bomber Command during World War II<ref> "A Failure of Intelligence", Essay in Technology Review (Nov-Dec 2006) </ref> . After the war, he obtained a BA degree in mathematics from Cambridge University (1945) and was a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1946 to 1949. In 1947 he moved to the US, on a fellowship at Cornell University and then joined the faculty there as a physics professor in 1951 without a PhD. In 1953, he took up a post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In 1957, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
In the years following the war, Dyson was responsible for demonstrating the equivalence of the two formulations of quantum electrodynamics which existed at the time - Richard Feynman's diagrammatic path integral formulation and the variational methods developed by Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga (Dyson operator).
From 1957 to 1961 he worked on the Orion Project, which proposed the possibility of space-flight using nuclear pulse propulsion. A prototype was demonstrated using conventional explosives, but a treaty banning the use of nuclear weapons in space caused the project to be abandoned.
In 1977, Dyson supervised Princeton undergraduate John Aristotle Phillips in a term paper that outlined a credible design for a nuclear weapon. This earned Phillips the nickname The A-Bomb Kid.
Dyson has published a number of collections of speculations and observations about technology, science, and the future.
Dyson was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1966 and Max Planck medal in 1969. In the 1984–85 academic year he gave the Gifford lectures at Aberdeen, which resulted in the book Infinite In All Directions.
In 1998, Dyson joined the board of the Solar Electric Light Fund. In 2000, Dyson was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
As of 2003, Dyson is the president of the Space Studies Institute, the space research organization founded by Gerard K. O'Neill.
Dyson was a long time member of the JASON defense advisory group.
[edit] Views
[edit] Concepts
[edit] Dyson sphere
In 1960 Dyson wrote a short paper for the journal Science, entitled "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation".<ref>Dyson, Freeman J. (3 June 1960). "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation". Science 131 (3414): 1667 - 1668. DOI:10.1126/science.131.3414.1667.</ref> In it, he theorized that a technologically advanced society might completely surround its native star in order to maximize the capture of the star's available energy. Eventually, the civilization would completely enclose the star, intercepting electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths from visible light downwards and radiating waste heat outwards as infrared radiation. Therefore, one method of searching for extraterrestrial civilisations would be to look for large objects radiating in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Dyson conceived that such structures would be clouds of asteroid-sized space habitats, though science fiction writers have preferred a solid structure: either way, such an artifact is often referred to as a Dyson sphere, although Dyson himself used the term "shell". Dyson says that he used the word "artificial biosphere" in the article meaning a habitat, not a shape.<ref>20 minutes into a video</ref> The "science fiction writer", though he did not refer to himself as such, Olaf Stapledon had a similar idea in a section of Star Maker. Perhaps because of this Dyson says it should really be called the Stapledon Sphere. That said other writers, specifically Bob Shaw, expanded on what Dyson further says was really his humor tacked on at the end of the article. One of the most famous science fiction examples was illustrated in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which retired Engineer Scotty (from the original Star Trek) was found to have crash-landed on an abandoned Dyson sphere. Larry Niven's novel Ringworld was inspired by Dyson's concept.
[edit] Dyson tree
Dyson has also proposed the creation of a Dyson tree, a genetically-engineered plant capable of growing on a comet. He suggested that comets could be engineered to contain hollow spaces filled with a breathable atmosphere, thus providing self-sustaining habitats for humanity in the outer solar system.
[edit] Dyson's transform
Dyson also has some credits in Elementary number theory. His concept "Dyson's transform" led one of the most important lemmas of Olivier Ramaré's theorem that every even integer is a sum of at most six primes.
[edit] Criticism of global warming studies
Dyson has questioned the predictive value of current computational models of climate change, urging instead more extensive use of local observations. He considers this view to be "heretical", along with his views on the PhD system.
| The good news is that we are at last putting serious effort and money into local observations. Local observations are laborious and slow, but they are essential if we are ever to have an accurate picture of climate. The bad news is that the climate models on which so much effort is expended are unreliable because they still use fudge-factors rather than physics to represent important things like evaporation and convection, clouds and rainfall. Besides the general prevalence of fudge-factors, the latest and biggest climate models have other defects that make them unreliable. With one exception, they do not predict the existence of El Niño. Since El Niño is a major feature of the observed climate, any model that fails to predict it is clearly deficient. The bad news does not mean that climate models are worthless. They are, as Manabe said thirty years ago, essential tools for understanding climate. They are not yet adequate tools for predicting climate.<ref>http://www.aps.org/apsnews/0599/059916.cfm</ref> |
While he acknowledges the reality of climate change due to anthropogenic causes, such as the burning of fossil fuels, he regards the term "global warming" as a mis-nomer:
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Regarding political efforts to reduce the causes of climate change, Dyson argues that other global problems should take priority.
| I'm not saying the warming doesn't cause problems, obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it. I'm saying that the problems are being grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are much more urgent and important. Poverty, infectious diseases, public education and public health. Not to mention the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans.<ref>http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?DysonWinCom05</ref> |
[edit] Science and Religion
Dyson is a strong opponent of reductionism. He is a non-dogmatic Christian, happy to attend various churches and indifferent to much theology.<ref name="edge68.html">Templeton Prize Lecture</ref>
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Dyson disagrees with the famous remark by his fellow-physicist Steven Weinberg that "Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion." <ref name="nyrb06.html">NYRB June 22, 2006</ref>
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[edit] Popular Culture
The fictional character Gordon Freeman in the Half-Life franchise was named after Dyson.
As noted above, the Dyson sphere is a favorite of science-fiction authors.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
<references/>
[edit] Books
[edit] By Dyson
- Disturbing the Universe, 1979
- Weapons and Hope, 1984
- Infinite in all Directions, 1988
- Origins of Life, 1986
- From Eros to Gaia, 1992
- Selected Papers of Freeman Dyson, 1996
- Imagined Worlds, 1997
- The Sun, The Genome and The Internet
[edit] About Dyson
- Brower, Kenneth, 1978. The Starship and the Canoe, Holt Rinehart and Winston.
- Schweber, Sylvan S., 1994. QED and the men who made it : Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga. Princeton Univ. Press.
- L'importanza di essere imprevedibile, Di Renzo Editore, Roma, 2003
[edit] External links
- Freeman J. Dyson's homepage
- Freeman Dyson Biography
- Wired magazine interview: Freeman Dyson's Brain
- Video of Freeman Dyson at the Peoples Archive
- A google video: interviewer: Robert Wright editor: Greg Dingle
- listen to a Freeman Dyson interview on Radiophiles.org
- audio of NPR interview with Freeman Dyson
- Disturbing the Universe: Interview with Freeman Dyson
- Freeman Dyson wins $1m religion prize
- Freeman Dyson's scientific publications from PubMed
- In Praise of Open Thinking, audio from a panel discussion with his son George on ITConversations.com
- O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "Freeman Dyson". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
- Seed Magazine: On My Mind: Freeman Dyson
- Templeton Prize acceptance lecture 2000
- The Space Show radio interview
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dyson, Freeman John |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Physicist and mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 15, 1923 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | England |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
es:Freeman Dyson fr:Freeman Dyson ko:프리먼 다이슨 it:Freeman Dyson hu:Freeman Dyson ja:フリーマン・ダイソン pl:Freeman Dyson ru:Дайсон, Фримен sl:Freeman John Dyson fi:Freeman Dyson tg:Фриман Дайсон zh:弗里曼·戴森
Categories: Articles to be expanded | Quantum Electrodynamics' physicists | 1923 births | 20th century mathematicians | American mathematicians | American physicists | Cornell University alumni | Christians in science | English mathematicians | English physicists | Futurists | Living people | Members and associates of the US National Academy of Sciences | Naturalized citizens of the United States | Old Wykehamists | Space advocacy | Enrico Fermi Award recipients | Wolf Prize in Physics recipients | Erdős number 2
