Maverick Genius

by Phillip F. Schewe

  In finishing his article and wanting to underscore his hope that we take comfort in the fresh knowledge that science supplies, Dyson let Blake have the final word:

  If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite, for man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.32

  BUSIEST DECADE

  Looking back on his astronomy career, Freeman Dyson conceded that much of his work was ephemeral.33 He was a cheerleader and not a practitioner:

  A large fraction of theoretical papers in astrophysics, including mine, are imaginative speculations based on crude approximations. They are quickly written and quickly forgotten. I did not find in astrophysics any opportunities to employ elegant mathematics. In this field my tastes and my talents remained orthogonal. My love of observational detail and my talent for exact mathematics were never effectively combined.34

  By almost all measures, though, Freeman Dyson was a successful scientist. Honors were piling up. He had been elected a member of the Royal Society in 1952, before he’d even turned thirty. America’s most prestigious science club, the National Academy, gave him membership in 1964, having been nominated by Yang and Oppenheimer. He had earned no Ph.D. (and was proud of it) for regular graduate work, but was now starting to receive honorary doctorates: from Yeshiva in 1966 and Glasgow and Princeton in 1974. Dozens more were to follow. The U.S. Congress thought enough of his commonsense views on the impact of science and technology to invite him three times to testify: about the test ban treaty in 1963, about missile defense in 1969, and about DNA research in 1977.

  Dyson did not share the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics but he was acquiring many of the rest of the awards worth having. In 1965 the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society gave him the Dannie Heineman Prize for mathematical physics. In 1966 he received the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy. On and on: in 1968 the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society, in 1969 the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society, in 1970 the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize of the Center for Theoretical Studies in Miami, and in 1977 the Harvey Prize of the Technion in Israel. The citations for most of these awards refer, of course, to Dyson’s QED work of the 1940s, but some also referred to the other subjects on which Dyson had published important papers.*

  The decade portrayed in this chapter, the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, was arguably the busiest in Dyson’s professional career. He was the Mozart or Bach of physics, prolifically composing pieces of all sorts—on magnets, fluids, pulsars, gravity waves, statistical mechanics, cosmology, extraterrestrial intelligence, the fundamental physical constants, and the stability of matter. Through his involvement with the Jasons he participated in work on adaptive optics, climate change, laser propulsion, missile defense, and nuclear weapons. He continued to do work in the area of pure mathematics. One such paper touched upon work performed sixty years earlier by one of Dyson’s teachers, Cambridge mathematician John Littlewood. Littlewood was then still alive and regarded Dyson’s paper (along with its dedication to Littlewood) as the greatest compliment he had ever received.35

  There is often in hyper-achievers the sense that even more and better work could have been accomplished. Dyson had reached his fifties and was no longer the precocious youngster. People expected him to write brilliant papers, which he did. But he wasn’t, as he had been with QED, at the very forefront of physics. Plenty of other scientists wrote brilliant papers. Some of the most brilliant were by his colleagues at the Institute. Dyson felt that he was no longer as smart as some of the guys down the hall.36 Was this the beginning of some kind of recessional?

  Dyson didn’t realize it at the time, but the first half of his career, the scientific phase, was running out. The second half, the part of his career that tapped accumulated wisdom, was about to begin.

  13. Science and Sublime

  Dyson as Essayist

  (1975–1985)

  He hadn’t seen the boy in years. Actually he wasn’t a boy anymore but a man. He’d left the family and made something of himself. George Dyson now lived on the parcels of land in the channel of water between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland. He lived simply, did odd jobs in the area, and had fulfilled his dream of building a large kayak.

  Freeman Dyson wanted to visit his son, and so he traveled north, along with his daughter Emily. The ensuing miniature Dyson reunion was documented in a curious book called The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower, the brother of one of George’s Berkeley friends. At the heart of the book are the contrasts between two men, George and Freeman; between two building projects, Saturn-bound Orion and ocean-going kayak; and between two lifestyles, the Princeton life of research and lectures and the Northwest outdoor life centered on woodland and nautical adventure. Brower’s book was more profile than biography, since its time frame was so focused. Its story culminated with an incisive view of the week-long meeting of father, daughter, and son. At the time of this encounter in August 1975 George was twenty-two, Freeman fifty-one, and Emily fourteen.

  Both Brower’s account and Freeman’s account—for he too would write up his impressions—began diplomatically with descriptions of the rugged, misty conifer environment of the Pacific Northwest, where grit, resourcefulness, and a desire to be away from the trappings of civilization are primary.

  Freeman, more used to teas at the Institute, was impressed by the ability of the men and women on these islands to use and retool heavy powered machines as required. He admired the cheerfulness of young couples adapting to simple conditions and raising children in a near-wilderness. He appreciated their pluck. “These are precisely the people we shall need for homesteading the asteroids,” he thought, illustrating the point that Freeman’s space mission thinking was present even here—we should say especially here—in a rough-hewn, woodsmoke-scented cabin in the middle of the Queen Charlotte Strait.1 Maybe this, more than the high-tech sets used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is what a human homestead on the moons of Jupiter might look like a century hence, with suitable provisions for high-vacuum and low-gravity conditions.

  In his role as field anthropologist, Brower tried not to intrude on the delicate process of family reacquaintance and yet remain alert to meaningful nuances amid the interplay of words. For instance, George asked Freeman whether on Freeman’s recent visit to Europe he had seen evidence that the Dyson clan was faring well. No, came the answer, the Dysons seemed to be dwindling. “Not that the father cared,” said Brower in his summary. “The genes survived, said the father of five daughters, and that, he supposed, was the important thing.”2 The father, in turn, asked the son whether he would help to perpetuate the Dysons. “Not so many,” George said, smiling. “One or two maybe.”3

  Another poignant moment underscoring the continuing differences between the Princeton intellectual and the Vancouver outdoorsman came when everyone was sitting by lantern light around a kitchen table and a marijuana cigarette began circulating. George offered it to Freeman, who declined with hardness in his voice. “The Dysons, father and son, had narrowed the gap, but each at this moment had come to a final frontier of his territory,” Brower observed, “and could go no farther. They would continue to orbit each other at this distance.”4

  Freeman’s account of the island sojourn does not include the marijuana moment, but both his and Brower’s tellings do relate the episode of the capsized boat. On the last full day of the visit, everyone was talking near the shore when they noticed that a mile out a small boat was laboring against the powerful tidal flow. When the boat disappeared, George Dyson and Ken Brower reacted instantly. They hopped in a motorboat, shot out to the churning water, heroically plucked two men from the ocean, and fetched them back to land. The rescued men, nearly dead from hypothermia, were further revived by a hot breakfast of George’s pancakes. As things settled down, Freeman talked with one of the survivors, who asked about Dyson’s work and accomplishments as a scientist back east. “It seems
to me now,” Freeman told the man in the spirit of this exhilarating moment, “the best thing I ever did in Princeton was to raise that boy.”5

  BORN WRITER

  Indeed Dyson had done many fine things in Princeton. Freeman was the father of Esther, George, Dorothy, Emily, Mia, and Rebecca. Of course, he is known chiefly as a man of consequence in the science world. In the few months before his Vancouver adventure, he had crammed in a lot: finished up a sabbatical year (1974–75) at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, where he did mostly astronomy research; obliged the navy by studying submarine noise with his Jason colleagues; got his adaptive optics work declassified by the military; and grappled with land-sea-and-air carbon dioxide estimates at Oak Ridge. In the few months after Vancouver he would again study magnets, would travel to an observatory in the Caucasus Mountains, and would be asked by the Phi Beta Kappa organization to undertake a program of lectures at eight colleges in places like Idaho, Georgia, and Oregon.

  Coming between these two batches of scientific undertakings, and only a few weeks after Vancouver, an innocuous offer arrived from the Sloan Foundation. They wanted Dyson to write an autobiographical book. In making this overture Sloan said that its goal was to promote a greater public understanding of science or, to be more precise, a better understanding of the scientific enterprise as a human process. If not all the complexities of science (quantum field theory, say) could be conveyed in simple terms, at least the efforts to carry out science were to be laid out for appreciation—the hopes, the setbacks, the practical accomplishments, the rewards, and disappointments.6 Sloan asked several other scientists to tell their tales too, such as physician and writer Lewis Thomas and biologist Francis Crick.

  By this point, Dyson was a seasoned writer of popular articles in Scientific American, The New Yorker, Time, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New York Times. He would now accelerate the transition from research to writing. He justified his decision by quoting an assertion of his Cambridge teacher G. H. Hardy—“Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.”7 Dyson was still capable of original research, but indeed hereafter his science production would slow while his writing production would increase. There would be ample reward for the shift. Accepting Sloan’s offer was to be a pivotal development in Dyson’s life. “Life begins at fifty-five,” he said later in a sprightly mood, “the age at which I published my first book.”8

  In his previous writings Dyson had shown a strong grasp of history, and not just science history. Indeed his command of past events was confident enough and large enough that he could allow himself the luxury of being philosophical. After all, many of the chapters in the book were to be autobiographical, and drawing out lessons from life’s episodes was to become one of Dyson’s favorite pastimes. Like a great novelist, he offered up a panoramic morality play—about science, technology, war, and exploration. His dramatis personae, the characters who turn up repeatedly in his pages, are often polymaths like Dyson himself: H. G. Wells, who combines a scientist’s and a novelist’s visions; Hans Bethe, kindly and astute; Edward Teller, mercurial, brilliant, devastating; Robert Oppenheimer, Faustian, heroic and tragic; Ted Taylor, the most ethical great man Dyson ever met; and Richard Feynman, bon vivant and effervescent thinker.

  The name of Dyson’s book, Disturbing the Universe, was taken from a line in T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The protagonist in Eliot’s poem is timid and mostly doesn’t dare to disturb anything. The protagonist in Dyson’s book, himself, does dare to create a disturbance, or at least to question the status quo. He declares that his mission in writing Disturbing the Universe is to be an apostle of science to the world of nonscientists. He intends to examine the ethical component of science, especially as it applies to a spectrum of venerable human issues, “war and peace, freedom and responsibility, hope and despair.”9 Dyson’s approach to describing the ethical side of science is not to use equations but to tell stories. His approach will be literary, not analytical.

  Most of the chapters run in chronological order through Dyson’s life. In his careful selection of teachable moments, we see a scientific sensibility coming into existence, as the young Dyson grapples with academic interests and career choices. But just as important is the blossoming concern for ethical and historical issues. His presentation is personable. You might get the impression that you were hearing the voice rather than reading the page. It’s easy to imagine you were in the presence of an adroit stage performer, like Spalding Gray, the monologist who sat at a simple table, sipped occasionally from a glass of water, and, while keeping direct eye contact with you alone, told tales of charming simplicity.

  Dyson’s book opens with him at the age of eight up a tree reading a book, The Magic City (1910) by Edith Nesbit. The story depicts a Harry Potter sort of orphan who confronts unceasing perils in a phantasmal setting. Dyson identifies three features in Nesbit’s book that are also important in his own writing career: searching for adventure, struggling with the consequences of technology, and interpreting prophecies. A sense of adventure and ethical considerations are evident right here in Dyson’s first book. The “prophetic” side of his writing would take a while longer to materialize.

  What are the indispensable stories he has to tell? His time with Bomber Command, his arrival in the United States, his friendship with Feynman, the agonies of Oppenheimer and Teller, the exhilarations of designing nuclear reactors, nuclear rockets, and nuclear treaties. With its autobiographical arc, Disturbing the Universe is the closest thing Dyson would come to an extended narrative. Thereafter he would publish many more books, so it will sound strange to say that he is not really a book writer. What he writes are essays that later become the chapters in booklike collections.

  Disturbing the Universe was published in 1979 and was nominated for an American Book Award and later for a National Book Award when it was reissued in paperback. It won mostly admiring reviews. The New Republic, perceiving a tragic tone in the book, concentrated on Dyson’s experience with Bomber Command, the development of nuclear power and weaponry, and the prospects, good and bad, for manipulating DNA molecules, a field of research then in its relative infancy.10

  A review in Science by astronomer George Field noted that the book quoted poets more often than physicists. Field compared Disturbing the Universe to a bestseller from a few years before, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a philosophical look at technology.11

  Field pointed to the appearance of something unusual in a book about the scientific life—a recourse to the artistic and spiritual side of things. With a whole book at his disposal Dyson took poetic license to say things about science that he had expressed previously only in a muted way. And with dispensation came disputation. It was necessary to pick a fight with a friend.

  PURSUING THE SUBLIME

  Freeman Dyson has high respect for Steven Weinberg. Not only is Weinberg famous among physicists for helping to unify the known forces of nature into a consolidated mathematical framework. He is also, like Dyson, a notable author. Dyson credits Weinberg’s 1977 book, The First Three Minutes, with legitimizing the study of the deep past. Firm new ideas about the nature of the early universe, fresh celestial observations to back up the ideas, and Weinberg’s confident, clear prose all helped to make it intellectually permissible, even fashionable, to study this subject—the creation of the cosmos—which until recently had been in the province of theologians rather than scientists. Then, in Dyson’s view, Weinberg nearly spoiled the whole thing by concluding his exhilarating book by saying this: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”12

  In his own book Freeman Dyson took the opposite tack. He liked looking for the point of things. He broached the desirability of retaining a spiritual outlook, or at least of keeping an open mind on issues that can’t yet be settled by science: “I do not claim that the architecture of the universe proves the existence of God. I claim only that the architect
ure of the universe is consistent with the hypothesis that mind plays an essential role in its functioning.”13

  In offering this kind of observation, Dyson knew he was bumping up against many mainstream scientists who insist there is no “life force.” As far as we know, even intelligent matter, such as the human brain, operates according to the same physical laws as inanimate matter. Jacques Monod, the prominent microbiologist, is typical of those who insist on a clean break with what he calls “animism.” The origin of the human species, Monod argued, is but one chance occurrence in a long evolutionary trail of life in the universe. We must be objective about this. Human consciousness is not privileged, Monod said, and is not in any way mixed up with the intrinsic blueprint of the cosmos, if indeed there is any blueprint. The arrival of Homo sapiens might be a marvelous accident, but it is an accident.

  Dyson objects mightily to this: “I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.”14

  Are there any signs that the presence of humans in any way “disturbs” the universe? For Dyson, exactly such portents seem to appear in the form of poignant dreams. The recurring dream of his standing helpless near the sight of a crashed and burning airplane is an example. He doesn’t invoke classic Freudian psychology to interpret the dream as evidence of his guilt or cowardice. He merely mentions the dream several times in his writings, allowing us to form our own opinion. So it is with a pair of dreams Dyson saves for the end of Disturbing the Universe. He tells the reader his reason for this: “A dream shows up hidden connections between things that our own waking minds keep in separate compartments.”15