Dreams of Earth and Sky

Freeman Dyson

New York Review of Books, Apr 21, 2015 - Science - 312 pages

In this sequel to The Scientist as Rebel (2006), Freeman Dyson—whom The Times of London calls “one of the world’s most original minds”—celebrates openness to unconventional ideas and “the spirit of joyful dreaming” in which he believes that science should be pursued. Throughout these essays, which range from the creation of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century to the scientific inquiries of the Romantic generation to recent books by Daniel Kahneman and Malcolm Gladwell, he seeks to “break down the barriers that separate science from other sources of human wisdom.” 

Dyson discusses twentieth-century giants of physics such as Richard Feynman, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Paul Dirac, and Steven Weinberg, many of whom he knew personally, as well as Winston Churchill’s pursuit of nuclear weapons for Britain and Wernher von Braun’s pursuit of rockets for space travel. And he takes a provocative, often politically incorrect approach to some of today’s most controversial scientific issues: global warming, the current calculations of which he thinks are probably wrong; the future of biotechnology, which he expects to dominate our lives in the next half-century as the tools to design new living creatures become available to everyone; and the flood of information in the digital age. Dyson offers fresh perspectives on the history, the philosophy, and the practice of scientific inquiry—and even on the blunders, the wild guesses and wrong theories that are also part of our struggle to understand the wonders of the natural world.

Contents

• Writing Natures Greatest Book: 19
• io What Price Glory?: 143
• Silent Quantum Genius: 157
• The Case for FarOut Possibilities: 171
• Science on the Rampage: 183
• How We Know: 193
• The Dramatic Picture of Richard Feynman: 209
• How to Dispel Your Illusions 22 I: 221
• What Can You Really Know?: 235
• The Shape of Genius 2 47: 247
• How to Be an Underdog and Win: 259
• Love the Bomb: 271

About the author

Freeman Dyson has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.

Dyson’s books include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999), The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999), The Scientist as Rebel (2006, published by New York Review Books), and A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2010). New York Review Books will publish Dreams of Earth and Sky, a new collection of Dyson's essays, in April 2015. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Dreams of Earth and Sky
• Author: Freeman Dyson
• Publisher: New York Review of Books, 2015
• ISBN: 1590178556, 9781590178553
• Length: 312 pages
• Subjects: Science / Essays; Science / Natural History; Science / Philosophy & Social Aspects