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In memory of Freeman Dyson, the genius of mathematics, turned into a technological visionary

After a breakthrough in the study of light and matter in the early years, he became a writer who challenged climatology and studied space exploration and nuclear weapons.



Freeman Dyson at the Advanced Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1972. He gained public acclaim as a writer and technology seer.

Freeman John Dyson, a mathematical genius who left his mark on subatomic physics before addressing less ordered things, in particular the Earth’s environmental future and the moral aspects of war, left us on February 28 in a hospital near Princeton, New Jersey. He was 96 years old.

His daughter, Mia Dyson, confirmed the death. His son George said that three days earlier, Dyson had fallen in a cafe at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, "which has been his scientific home for over 60 years," as the press release wrote .

As a young graduate student at Cornell University in 1949, Dyson wrote a landmark work - some of his colleagues even considered it worthy of the Nobel Prize - a deeper understanding of the interaction of light with matter, which leads to the emergence of the world we perceive. The theory promoted by this work, which was then called quantum electrodynamics (QED), is considered one of the greatest achievements of modern science.

However, he earned public recognition as a writer and technology visionary. He imagined the study of the solar system with the help of spaceships driven by nuclear explosions, and the foundation of distant colonies that feed on genetically modified plants.

“Life begins at age 55 - at this age I published my first book,” he wrote in his book “From Eros to Gaia,” one of those that he created as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Studies - an impressive post for a person without doctoral degree. The absence of this degree was his pride, he said. Because of his huge collection of honorary degrees and membership in the Royal Scientific Community, people still called him "Dr. Dyson."

Dyson called himself a scientific heretic and warned of the need not to confuse mathematical abstractions with the true truth. Although his early work on QED helped put photons and electrons on a consistent theoretical platform, Dyson doubted that superstrings, or anything else, would lead scientists to Theory of Everythinguniting all physics with a concise formula that fits on a T-shirt.

In a 2000 speech he delivered at the Templeton Prize for his success in research or discovery in spiritual life, Dyson quoted Francis Bacon as saying: “God forbid that we give out a dream of our imagination as a model of the world.”

Enjoying the role of a rebel, he astounded the scientific community, rejecting the generally accepted opinion regarding the threats of climate change caused by human actions, calling it "tribal group thinking." He doubted the validity of climate models, and infuriated experts with optimistic forecasts that they considered wishful thinking: excess carbon in the air would benefit plants, and global warming precedes another ice age.

In an article about Dyson published in The New York Times Magazine in 2009, his colleague Stephen Weinberg, a Nobel laureate, remarked: “I get the feeling that when a consensus begins to form like ice on the surface of the lake, Dyson will do everything possible to crack this ice. ”



Dyson's distrust of mathematical models had previously made him question the predictions that atomic warfare fragments that rose into the air could overshadow the sun and lead to a nuclear winter. He said that he would like it to be that way - it could become an additional psychological means of deterring nuclear war - but he found this theory inferior.

Despite all his doubts about the ability of mere mortals to count on such complex things as the effects of climate change, he was confident enough in our ability to create tools to offer a technological fix to this problem. If carbon dioxide levels become too high, genetically modified trees can be planted to remove excess molecules from the air. This will free scientists for other, more urgent problems, such as ridding humanity of poverty and wars.

He considered himself an environmentalist. “I’m a Drevolub, I love frogs and forests,” he wrote in 2015 for The Boston Globe. “They do not pay attention to more urgent and real problems, such as overfishing in the oceans and destruction of terrestrial habitats of animals, while environmental activists spend time and energy talking about climate change.” Few people shared this position, to put it mildly.

He was a religious man, but in an unorthodox sense, considering good deeds more important than theology.

“Science is interesting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, but religion is also interesting,” he said during his speech when he received the Templeton Prize. "The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of the existence of us, intelligent beings, in the far corner of the vast Universe."

Freeman John Dyson was born December 15, 1923 in the village of Crowthorne, Berkshire, England. His father, George Dyson, was a composer and conductor. The family’s archive contains an unfinished story that Freeman began to write when he was 8 years old - it told of a fictional expedition to the moon to observe an imminent collision with an asteroid. Among the books that the boy read, in addition to the works of Jules Verne, there were popular science literature by authors such as James Hopwood Jeans and Arthur Stanley Eddington - British physicists who were inclined to popularize science.

After graduating from school at Winchester College, where his father taught music, he enrolled at Trinity College at Cambridge University, where he excelled in mathematics.

In search of opportunities to participate in the war, not contradicting his pacifist views, in 1943 he went to work as a civilian scientist in the control of the Royal Air Force bombers. He was given the task of planning more effective bombing with the help of mathematics. Many years later, in an interview with physicist and historian Sylvan Schweber, he talked about the torment, which he himself assessed as moral cowardice, comparing himself to the Nazi bureaucrats, "counting how to kill people most economically."

Enthusiastic about the theoretical frontiers discovered during military research on nuclear fission, Dyson returned to Cambridge and concentrated on becoming a physicist. Having a bachelor's degree in mathematics, he enrolled in physical graduate school at Cornell in 1947, the teacher in the cat wasHans Bethe , former leader of the Manhattan project .

Traveling around the USA next summer, Dyson solved one pressing problem of theoretical physics.


Dyson in 1963,

Richard Feynman, then a young professor at Cornell, invented a new method for describing the behavior of electrons and photons (and antiparticles of electrons, positrons). But two other physicists, Julian Schwinger and Sinichiro Tomonaga , independently proposed a completely different method. Each of them seemed to satisfy the requirements of both quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity — two litmus test papers of nature. But which one was true?

At the intersection of Nebraska on the Greyhound bus, Dyson had a revelation: these theories were mathematically equivalent. These were different ways of describing the same thing. So QED was born. Feynman called it "the gem of physics - our best asset."

By the time Dyson published the details of his idea in 1949, his doctorate probably seemed to him an unnecessary formality. He was appointed professor of physics at Cornell in 1951. But he soon realized that teaching was not his. In 1953, he became a scientist at the Institute for Advanced Studies, where he spent the rest of his career.

Dyson did not envy Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga for the 1965 Nobel Prize they received. “I think that with almost no exceptions, to get a Nobel Prize, you need to be able to concentrate on one problem for a long time, find a deep and important task, and work on it for 10 years without a break,” he told The Times Magazine in 2009. “It my style".

He preferred to skip from one task to another, alternating theory and practice. In the 1950s, as a consultant at General Atomics in San Diego, he helped design the TRIGA reactor, used for research and nuclear medicine, and worked on the Orion manned nuclear-powered spacecraft project to study the solar system.

After the signing of the agreement on the prohibition of testing nuclear weapons in 1963, Dyson's dreams of reaching Saturn by 1970 were destroyed. Despite this disappointment, he supported the treaty and sometimes, as a member of JASON , a group of independent consultant scientists, advised the US government on disarmament and defense issues.

However, his interests did not end on the surface of the Earth. In a work published in 1960, he noted that any advanced civilization should eventually develop to a state where it needs all the energy that its star system can provide. And the final solution to this problem would be to build a shell around the star - the Dyson sphere- would capture all her energy. In a thought experiment, he reasoned that earthlings could achieve this by dismantling Jupiter into parts and reassembling them in a new way.


Dyson in 2016

Meanwhile, Dyson supported the more familiar forms of solar energy, while urging astronomers looking for extraterrestrial intelligence to pay attention to the heat that enclosed stars could emit. As for the colonization of other planets by humanity, he proposed to develop a Dyson tree genetically modified in order to grow on comets, creating an atmosphere suitable for breathing.

He also continued to do less bizarre work. She and colleague Endoy Lenard won a bottle of champagne in a dispute, proving Pauli’s ban principle, in which two fermions (for example, electrons) cannot be in the same quantum state, due to which matter remains stable. In 1965, Dyson received the Danny Heinemann Prize [in the field of mathematical physics], which in prestige is second only to the Nobel Prize.

Few properties of the surrounding world, outstanding or mundane, did not interest his curious mind. Among his works is the derivation of a mathematical equation that describes the seam of a baseball that he thought was beautiful.

In the late 1970s, Dyson threw all his energy into writing books. Any person who is interested in science and appreciates good literature will probably have several of his books on the shelf: “Perturbing the Universe”, “Weapons and Hope”, “Infinite in all directions”, “Sun, genome and the Internet”.

He also entered the literature in another way. He appeared in John McPhee's book The Binding Energy Curve (1974), describing Ted Taylor, the nuclear physicist who led the Orion project, and in Kenneth Brower's book, Star Ship and Canoe (1978). In a memorable scene, Brower describes Dyson's reunion with his son George, who abandoned high technology to live in a tree house in British Columbia and build a canoe that can walk on the sea. George Dyson then returned to civilization and became a technology historian and author of books. Dyson's daughter Esther Dyson is a well-known investor in Silicon Valley.

In addition to them and their daughter Mia, Dyson has a second wife, Aymme Dyson; three more daughters, Dorothy Dyson, Emily Dyson Scott and Rebecca Dyson; adopted daughter Katarina Hafely, and 16 grandchildren. Dyson was married to mathematician Verena Huber, but divorced her. She died in 2016.

Dyson's living mind worked to the very end. In 2012, at the age of 88, he, together with William Press, wrote a paper on the prisoner's dilemma, a mathematical concept that is important for understanding human behavior and the nature of evolution.

Over the age of 90, Dyson was still advising the government on nuclear reactor design and the new CRISPR gene editing technology. In 2018, when he turned 95, his book, Pattern Creator: An Autobiography in Letters, was published.

In his speech at the presentation of the Templeton Prize, Dyson suggested that the universe is governed by the "principle of maximum diversity", ensuring that it develops in the "most interesting" way. Whether this principle is important or not for physics, it definitely describes the course of its unusual life.

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