Maverick Genius
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I dedicate this book to my wife, Andrea Schewe, who is lovely in many senses.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Introduction
1. Killing Time: Dyson Bombs Berlin (1923–1945)
Winchester. Young Dyson is sure he will die in the war. Bullied by older boys. Retreats into mathematics and science fiction. Best student in Britain. Poetry in chemistry class. Start of world war. Cambridge for two years. Night climbing. Bomber Command. Killing civilians. Should he enlist? Nightmares begin.
2. Life Is a Blur: Dyson as Mathematician (1945–1947)
Postwar London. Mathematics or physics? Quantum weirdness explained. Again at Cambridge. Wittgenstein incident. Graduate school recommendation: “best mathematician in England.” Going to America. Summer in Germany.
3. Ecumenical Councils: Dyson as Seminarian (1947–1948)
Studies with Bethe at Cornell. Quantum crisis: looming infinities. Famous science meetings: Solvay, Shelter Island, and Pocono. Feynman vs. Schwinger. Driving to New Mexico with Feynman. Conversation in a brothel. Summer in Michigan with Schwinger.
4. The Secret Signature of Things: Dyson as Artist (1948–1949)
Bus to California. Reads Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. Epiphany in Nebraska. Moves to Princeton. Battles with Oppenheimer. Decisive series of lectures. Job offers pour in. Dysonmania compared to Beatlemania. Not a homosexual. Falls in love with Verena Huber. Returns to Europe.
5. Recessional: Dyson as Professor (1949–1953)
Birmingham. Klaus Fuchs. Summer teaching in Michigan. Marries Verena. Summer in Zurich with Pauli. Research frustration. Daughter Esther born. Professor at Cornell. Writes first popular article for magazine. Son George born. Bad news from Fermi. QED today. Quits Cornell. Summer in Berkeley.
6. Nuclear Opera: Dyson and the Cold War (1954–1956)
Cold War tension at Princeton. Oppenheimer loses security clearance. Dr. Atomic. Berkeley again. Unexpected physics discoveries. Dyson wants six children. Georg Kreisel arrives in Princeton. Verena unhappy. Miscarriage. Verena takes children to Austria. Dyson’s startling confession.
7. Intrinsically Safe: Dyson as Engineer (1956–1957)
Verena might remain in Europe. Dyson designs reactor with Teller. Learns nuclear secrets in Los Alamos. Hedda Gabbler: sexual intrigue. Au pair, Imme Jung, arrives. Verena’s affair. Confrontation in Aspen. Verena moves out.
8. Space Traveler’s Manifesto: Dyson as Rocketeer (1957–1959)
Childhood story about moon mission. Sputnick and space race. Project Orion. Darwin on Mars. Saturn by 1970. Divorces Verena, marries Imme. Orion will redeem Hiroshima. Nevada desert: soul-shattering silence.
9. Civilized Behavior: Dyson Searches for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Early 1960s)
Love of science fiction, especially Olaf Stapledon’s. Dyson spheres. Types of future civilization. Taking stars apart. Orion cancelled. Stanley Kubrick consults Dyson for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
10. Nuclear Manifesto: Dyson as Diplomat (Early 1960s)
Against test ban treaty, then changes his mind. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Dr. Strangelove. Cuban Missile Crisis. Helps to craft test ban treaty. Testifies in Congress. Attends King’s “I have a dream” speech.
11. On the Oregon Trail: Dyson as Pentagon Consultant (1960s–1970s)
“Throw in some nukes.” Joins Jasons. Report on tactical nukes in Vietnam. Nearly killed in Santa Barbara bombing. Nightmares end. Adaptive optics. Early climate change research. Skepticism even then.
12. Success in Life: Dyson as Astronomer (Mid 1960s to Mid 1970s)
Feynman gets Nobel but not Dyson. Esther goes to Harvard. George’s drug-related arrest. Four more daughters. Family life. How Oppenheimer and Teller got their Fermi Awards. Life at the Institute. A-bomb Kid. Random Matrices. Stability of matter. Does astronomy. Career takes a big turn.
13. Science and Sublime: Dyson as Essayist (1976–1985)
Vancouver, reunited with George. Writes popular articles for New Yorker. First book, Disturbing the Universe. Pointless universe? Search for the sublime. Quick survey of Dyson’s career as public speaker and writer.
14. Nuclear Slavery: Dyson as Abolitionist (1980s)
Nearly killed in holdup. Crusade to eliminate nuclear weapons. Second book: Weapons and Hope. Visits bomber base, navy cruiser, missile factory. Iliad and Odyssey. End of Cold War. Wins Fermi Award. Visits Hiroshima.
15. The Arc of Life: Dyson as Biologist (1980s and 1990s)
Bad advice for Francis Crick. Proteins first, RNA later. Post-Darwinism. More books: Origins of Life. Infinite in All Directions. Homesteading the comets. Looking for life in the solar system. Develops far-future cosmology. Can life last forever? Digital vs. analog life.
16. God and Man at Princeton: Dyson as Preacher (1985–2000)
Retirement event. Family update. From Eros to Gaia. Selected Papers. Lectures in Scotland on religion and science: free will, teleology, argument from design, final aims. Theofiction. Socianian theology. Social Justice. Imagined Worlds. The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet. Winchester: At the Gate. Templeton Prize. Richard Dawkins’s reaction.
17. Splintering the Species: Dyson as Heretic (1990–2010)
Heresies and prophecies. Bully pulpit: essays in New York Review of Books. ESP. New York Times Magazine cover story. Doctor Climate. Biotech: pet dinosaurs. Frankenfood: debate with Bill Joy at Davos. Humanists versus environmentalists. Reprogenetics. Polynesians on Pluto. One world is not enough.
18. Long-Term Thinking: Dyson as Storyteller (Recent Years)
Family update. Trips to Greenland, Portugal, Galapagos, Kazakhstan. Esther trains as cosmonaut. Biosphere egg. The Scientist as Rebel. A Many-Colored Glass. Recent Dyson essays in New York Review. The Dalai Lama of physics. Heart condition. Thoughts on death. Dysoniad: 700 years of ancestors.
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Also by Phillip F. Schewe
About the Author
Copyright
Introduction
There he is, looking like a war criminal, staring out from the cover of The New York Times Magazine. The faint opening of his mouth gives you the impression he is about to speak in his defense. The picture caption relishes the irony: Freeman Dyson is a political liberal, a respected scientist, and yet on the supreme issue of global warming, he’s a doubter, even a heretic. He crusades against nuclear weapons but hopes China will burn more coal.
The Times article, appearing in March 2009, launched a thousand threads of blog comment. Many people were surprised or dismayed by Dyson’s views. Others admired him for his pluck in becoming a lightning rod for controversial views. Atlantic magazine named him to a small list of “brave thinkers.” In the same magazine a year later a feature article castigated him for promoting dangerous ideas about climate and biotechnology. In Foreign Affairs he was declared as one of the world’s leading “global thinkers.” And yet on the Charlie Rose television show, Mr. Rose asked Dyson in mock exasperation, “Why are you driving people crazy?”
Freeman Dyson’s notoriety notwithstanding, he is regarded as one of the most important scientists in the world and a notable thinker, speaker, and author. In a 2005 Wikipedia poll of the world’s leading living intellectuals, Dyson ranked 25th, just ahead of Steven Pinker and above such other figures as the biologist Edward O. Wi
lson, the historian Niall Ferguson, the art critic Robert Hughes, and the genome pioneer Craig Venter. Who is Dyson and why does he rank so high?
The physicist Freeman Dyson was born in Britain in 1923 and immigrated to the United States in 1947. He is still alive and has spent most of his career as a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Dyson is esteemed for work in a variety of areas—including quantum physics, national defense and arms control, space exploration, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, nuclear weapons and reactors, biology, astronomy, pure mathematics, and history. He won the million-dollar Templeton Prize for efforts to reconcile science and religion. He is the author of many books. He has six children and sixteen grandchildren.
Dyson comes highly recommended. Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek: “Dyson is the most impressive pure intellect I’ve ever met. He thinks at the speed of light.” Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke: “He is one of the few geniuses I have ever met.” Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg: “Dyson is as smart as they come.” Philosopher Avishai Margalit: “Dyson creates a moral climate for open discussion. He doesn’t bullshit. He is never indifferent to the truth. Evidence counts.” Physicist and New Yorker writer Jeremy Bernstein: “I have always felt Freeman Dyson knows more about everything than I know about anything.”
Dyson is a cultural figure. He, or rather his futurist prediction of an energy-absorbing “Dyson sphere,” was the centerpiece of an episode of Star Trek and several science fiction novels. He is said to be the model for the character Gordon Freeman in the computer game Half-Life, as well as being an inspiration for numerous other computer games.
More will be said in the Notes and Acknowledgments sections about who said what during the making of this book. It is pertinent to say here at the outset that although I have had several cordial brief exchanges with Freeman Dyson by phone and by email, he is guarded with his time and declined to be interviewed extensively. He feels that it’s too early to tell whether he did anything important.
He did, however, cheerfully acquiesce to this book going forward. I interviewed most members of his family and dozens of his colleagues. But the man himself stayed outside the project, and did not grant access to his correspondence. Fortunately, Dyson is a prolific writer, and many aspects of his life are open to public view.
This book is the first biography of Freeman Dyson. It certainly supplies many facts about his personal, intellectual, and scientific life. But whenever possible the narration will be driven by stories. The book should appeal to many kinds of readers—those interested in science, science fiction, Cold War history, genetic engineering, space exploration and the search for life outside of Earth, the uses of new technology and its impact on society, and the intersection (and clash) of science and religion.
This is a biography and not science history. Quantum physics is a fascinating subject; it represents an important part of Dyson’s career, and merits attention in several early chapters. But this book is not a history of quantum physics. Instead it concentrates on telling the story of Freeman Dyson’s life. The same caveat is true for other important topics, such as space exploration, nuclear weapons, biology, and religion. Each of these subjects will be explored, but only insofar as it helps tell the story of Dyson’s life. Telling stories has been a central part of Dyson’s own writing career, and will be the method used in this book as well.
This book does not have a grand thesis other than to advance the notion that some of the great wide-ranging essayists of the past such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Bernard Shaw, if they were alive now, might have been scientists rather like Freeman Dyson—interested in poetry, nuclear weapons, and social justice. Dyson is exactly their sort of modern-day Renaissance man. Both Emerson and Dyson are bold in telling others how things ought to be. Both seek to reconcile the knowledge brought by science with the knowledge rendered by art, history, philosophy, and religion. Dyson does not shun technology, as Henry David Thoreau supposedly did, but he possesses the same abiding scruples and poetic outlook that made Thoreau so interesting a writer about machines and cultural change.
Dyson is a contrarian in the style of Shaw. He holds many politically liberal views and yet also believes, for example, that human space travel should not be scaled down but up (providing we find the right means of transport). Like Shaw, Dyson has had numerous powerful friends, some of whom are also his opponents. These friends include many of the science and technology titans and other notable figures of the past half century, such as Richard Feynman, J. Robert Oppenheimer, George Kennan, and Edward Teller.
Despite being so pragmatic, Dyson is a cosmic optimist. During the Cold War, he argued that we could survive any international crisis as long as we kept our heads, were patient, and took into the account the views of our adversaries. He sees the Internet and biotechnology as the sources of a coming revolution in world standards of living—allowing people in Cairo or New Delhi to be as well off as people in London or Princeton.
The book proceeds generally in chronological order. Chapter 1 is about Dyson’s childhood in Winchester, England, and his service with Bomber Command during World War II. Chapter 2 covers the immediate postwar years and his switch from mathematics into physics. Chapters 3, 4, and 5, taking place at Cornell, Princeton, and in Europe, respectively, cover the most illustrious years of his physics research, when he triumphantly helped to reform quantum science. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 carry the story through the 1950s, including a look at Dyson’s family (and family problems), his coming to the Institute for Advanced Study, and his work at General Atomic on reactors and rocketships.
Chapter 9 concerns Dyson’s role in the effort to find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, while Chapter 10 recounts some of the most dramatic moments of the Cold War and Dyson’s role in achieving a partial test ban treaty with the Russians. Chapter 11 examines Dyson’s part in the Jason program, the organization of elite scientists that advises the government, and his contributions to a report about the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War. Chapters 12 and 13 show Dyson at his busiest—doing research in statistical mechanics, solid state physics, astronomy, and making his decisive swerve from science into writing.
The next few chapters chronicle Dyson’s course through the 1980s: his crusade to abolish nuclear weapons, his provocative theory about the origin of life, and his many lectures and essays about science, art, and religion, culminating in his receiving the Templeton Prize. Chapter 17 explores Dyson’s role as heretic and sage on such issues as climate, extrasensory perception, biotechnology, and his efforts to promote a visionary, long-term migration from Earth out into the cosmos.
Chapter 18 and the book conclude with a look at Dyson’s most recent few years. Officially retired from the Institute, he still goes to work every day, carries out a full schedule of speeches, and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. The reviews he writes, on an astonishing range of topics, sometimes become news events all by themselves. He continues to speak out on genetics, space exploration, nuclear weapons, and, somewhat unwillingly, about the topic that won’t go away—climate change, the study of which he helped to pioneer in the 1970s.
“Pioneering.” Is the adjective in the subtitle of this book justified? Well, in physics alone he can be credited with making fundamental contributions to solid-state physics, atomic physics, and statistical mechanics. In the realm of astrophysics he helped to found the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, helped to design the process—adaptive optics—now used on many telescopes to gain sharper imaging, and was the principal early architect of the cosmology of the far-future universe. Engineering: he helped launch the civilian nuclear reactor industry by designing a bestselling reactor used to this day in providing medical isotopes. His plan for a nuclear rocketship was never implemented but is often invoked in discussions of advanced propulsion. Continuing in a nuclear vein: Dyson helped to craft and promote a nuclear test ban, and he might have been influential in the deci
sion to keep tactical nuclear weapons out of Vietnam. Freeman Dyson is exemplary. Even if you disagreed with some of his views, you’d have to admit that the breadth of his interests and experience demonstrates how an individual can influence society in so many ways.
Probably the area where Dyson has had the greatest lasting cultural impact is in pondering the implications of space exploration. His grandest prophecy—thrilling and scary at the same time—is that the inevitable colonization of outer space, accompanied by biotechnology advances, will result in a great increase in liberty. But it could also bring with it increased strife, including the splintering of the human race into rival species. Evidence of this tension might be playing out already in the form of an unfortunate collision between environmentalists and humanists over the formulation of biotechnology and energy policy. Freeman Dyson—not content to be a kindly retired British-American gent—continues to offer important insights on these issues.
1. Killing Time
Dyson Bombs Berlin
(1923–1945)
Increasingly his thoughts turned to death. Freeman Dyson was sure he would die young. The violence had been breaking out in stages—Spain, Czechoslovakia, and China. Now in 1939 Hitler’s invasion of Poland made it official. Britain was at war.
Every day on the way to class he passed the monument to the young men of his school who had died in the Great War of 1914–1918. Presently it was his turn, and this time it would be worse. Technology had improved, had become more deadly. The aerial bombardment, experts said, would play a larger role.1 His Uncle Oliver, a doctor in charge of the ambulance brigade for London, expected 100,000 fatalities.2
As they approached manhood in the late 1930s, Dyson and his friends needed to rally around a principle. It was fashionable to proclaim Communist sympathies. But Dyson never liked being with the majority. He became a pacifist and despised the warmonger Winston Churchill the way many American teenagers would later despise Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.3 Dyson refused to participate in the standby-officers training program. Training for what? Useless killing. Mahatma Gandhi was his hero. Only peaceful methods could save the world. But time was running out.