And if even that isn’t enough real estate, Dyson will tell you how living organisms can hitch a ride on gravitationally ejected comets for journeys to stars beyond our own.53
18. Long-Term Thinking
Dyson as Storyteller
(RECENT YEARS)
What makes for renown? In a biography of Franz Kafka, the literary scholar Reiner Stach succinctly enumerates the factors:
The wider the net an individual casts in the world, the greater the likelihood that we will be captivated and impressed. Possessions, achievements, influence, power, sexual partners, descendants, admirers, successors, enemies: it is this horizontal dimension, the social extension of a person’s life, that rescues the life from the undertow of anonymity.1
Dyson has cast a wide net. His most palpable legacy is, of course, his family. In 1950 he expressed himself to Verena, his first wife, as wanting six children, and in the end that is what he got. And from these children he has sixteen grandchildren.
Dyson’s eldest child, Esther Dyson, is an investor and philanthropist. She lives in Manhattan and travels the world. One of the companies she has backed is called 23andMe, named for the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes packaged within each of the trillions of cells making up the human body. One of the main products sold by 23andMe is a service for reading a specimen of DNA from an individual and then comparing it to similar readings for other people.
As a Christmas present in 2007, Esther gave her extended family the gift of genetic knowledge. She sent test kits (twenty-six in all) to Freeman, Imme, and many of her siblings and nephews and nieces. So, instead of spreading the names of those six children and sixteen grandchildren across a family tree made of mere parchment, something much more quantitative could be displayed. From a sample of saliva an analysis for selected segments of DNA can be formed. Each person’s genetic map is unique, but that map reveals the genetic overlap with relatives. On average a child will inherit half of his operative genes from his mother and half from his father. A grandchild and grandparent share genes at the one-fourth level.
Esther is fond of posting family photographs on the Internet via Flickr, a company she supported as an early investor. She also posted some of the results from these DNA scans. This high-precision family history showed, for example, that genetically speaking Marcus Scott, son of Emily Dyson, is a bit more related to his grandfather Freeman (56 percent of Marcus’s maternal-related DNA) than to his grandmother Imme (44 percent). Conversely Marcus’s brother Mitchell is genetically a bit further from Freeman (43 percent) and closer to Imme (57 percent).2
This is the genetic Dyson. How about the current demographical Dyson?
THE DYSONS NOW
George Dyson lives in the port of Bellingham, Washington, about halfway between Seattle and Vancouver. He still builds kayaks and owns an expansive book-lined factory-showroom overlooking the harbor. He is better known now as a historian of science and technology. In addition to Baidarka and Darwin Among the Machines, he has written Project Orion (2006), a book about his father’s nuclear rocketship, and Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (2012). He is divorced and the father of a grown daughter, Lauren.
At holidays Freeman and Imme try to visit as many of the children as possible. Dorothy Dyson is a veterinarian specializing in large animals. She lives in Redding, near the north end of California’s central valley. She is divorced and the mother of three: Randall, Donald, and George. Emily is a cardiologist and mother of four: Max, Mitchell, Marcus, and Lucy. She lives in San Diego, not far from where Freeman often brought his family for Jason summer work. Mia is both a nurse and a minister. She lives in Pownal, Maine, and has four children: Bryn, Tess, Liam, and Aidan. Rebecca is a radiologist and lives in Mount Shasta, not far from Dorothy. She too is the mother of four: Charles, Clara, James, and Jack. Two of Freeman’s daughters have undergone treatment for breast cancer.
Verena Huber-Dyson taught mathematics and philosophy at the University of Calgary for many years. In 1988 she became an emerita professor. She now lives in a retirement home not far from George in Bellingham. Verena’s daughter Katarina lives in Vancouver. Katrina occasionally talks on the phone with her stepfather. Freeman’s other immediate family relative is his sister, Alice. Now in her nineties, she moved in the spring of 2010 into a retirement residence. It fell to Imme to sell the home in Winchester, England, that Sir George and Lady Dyson bought in the early 1950s. Freeman is still close to Alice and visits her once or twice a year.
Freeman Dyson has lived in the same Princeton home since 1956. It sits on a leafy lane not far from the Institute. The homestead includes a large backyard with plentiful flower beds tended scrupulously by Imme. She runs ten miles every day to stay in training. Recently she won a half marathon (for her age group) in Shasta, California. Freeman often accompanies Imme to running events in order to cheer her on. Sometimes he sits in the car reading books.
The interior of the Dyson homestead is darkly paneled. Photographs on the wall include one of Freeman’s father, Sir George, conducting a musical work; one is of Freeman at the Ad Portas ceremony at Winchester College; and one of him with a daughter on her wedding day.
A framed award meets the visitor upon entry near the stairway leading upstairs. Of all Dyson’s awards, which one does he choose for this prominent patch of wall? It’s the Oersted Medal, given by the American Association of Physics Teachers. For a man who professes not to like teaching—at least not the supervision of students through the doctorate mill—this might seem like a curious choice. On the other hand, the essence of Dyson’s career, through his writing and lecturing, has been to teach.
As this book makes clear, Dyson hasn’t had one career, but many. Even now, in his upper eighties, he continues to travel the world, adding to his storehouse of experience. This last chapter surveys recent events in his life and how he neatly compacts his circumspection into a workable philosophical view. Instead of keeping a private diary, he writes public essays for thousands to read. He likes telling stories.
SAN FRANCISCO, 2005
Freeman Dyson once compared himself with historian Barbara Tuchman, whose book A Distant Mirror used historical events in fourteenth-century Europe to reflect on events of the twentieth century. Instead of using the past as his mirror Dyson uses the future. His obsession with the future, he explains, is the flip side of his immersion in the past while growing up in the cathedral city of Winchester, where he lived in a home 300 years old and attended a school 600 years old.3 The school, Winchester College, was built mainly by William of Wykeham, who is mentioned in Tuchman’s book. For Dyson, walking the medieval hallways of his school, William was not just a figure in a book but an everyday reality.
Living in Winchester one swims in the past—the Roman, Saxon, Norman, and Tudor past. This only made young Freeman ponder all the harder what the future would look like. Winchester made a historian out of him, a historian of future events. Now obviously you can’t accurately write about things that haven’t yet happened. It’s hard enough to determine past events, at least with the precision available to physicists, who measure atomic properties to a part in a billion. That’s because electrons and planets are relatively simple. People and civilizations are more complicated.
What you can do, however, and what Dyson does so well, is to imagine what is possible for the future and what the laws of science allow. One thing Dyson counts on, in writing about the future, is continuity in the basic substance of human nature:
The past and future are not remote from us. The people of six hundred years back and of six hundred years ahead are people like ourselves. They are our neighbors in the universe. Technology has caused, and will cause, profound changes in styles of life and thought, separating us from our neighbors. All the more precious, then, are the bonds of kinship that tie us all together.4
Dyson once found himself at an exhibition of Paleolithic art. The objects were from France but looked, to his eye, as if they were from Japan:
&
nbsp; The exhibit showed us visually that over periods of ten thousand years the distinction between Western and Eastern and African culture lose all meaning. Over a time span of a hundred thousand years we are all Africans. And over a time-span of three hundred million years we are all amphibians.5
Future calendars might want to include not just days and months but also millennia.
This kind of thinking is encouraged by the Long Now Foundation, a group that sponsors discussions of deep history. Long Now was the host for an event in October 2005 when Esther, George, and Freeman Dyson all appeared on a public stage together for the first time. The topic of discussion was billed as “The Difficulty of Looking Ahead.” George introduced his father by giving a short summary of Freeman’s space-related exploits such as his boyhood story about the Erolunar encounter and his Orion work. Then George showed a clip from an episode of Star Trek in which the Starship Enterprise encounters a gigantic mysterious globe that defies all explanation. After some doubtful exchanges about the thing’s identity, the truth begins to dawn on Captain Piccard. “Commander Data,” he asks, “could it be a Dyson sphere?” This clip, which George has used to introduce his father a couple of times, never fails to bring forth ample laughter and a round of applause just as Freeman comes on stage.6
The Long Now evening was significant too because Freeman’s first wife, Verena Huber-Dyson, was in the audience. Imme had planned it all. Taking Freeman by the hand, Imme led him over to Verena. He giggled awkwardly, but the ensuing conversation was friendly and lasted about five minutes. This was the first time Freeman and Verena had seen each other in almost half a century.7
A few days later, Freeman was a speaker at a meeting across San Francisco Bay in Berkeley. The meeting celebrated the ninetieth birthday of Charles Townes, winner of the Nobel Prize for work on lasers and the Templeton Prize for religion and science. Dyson fit his tribute to Townes into the form of a talk about the future of science, and how progress depends on collaboration between unifiers and diversifiers. The standout unifiers, such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, are profound thinkers who consolidate a wealth of ideas into an elegant, universalist scientific framework. Their aim is, in effect, a theory of everything. By contrast, the best diversifiers, such as Enrico Fermi, uncover new ideas and explore new phenomena. Science needs both types. Unifiers, says Dyson, “are happy if they can leave the universe looking a bit simpler than they found it. Diversifiers are people who … are happy if they leave the universe a little more complicated than they found it.”8 Dyson, who loves complexity and diversity and mystery, claims to be a diversifier. It’s ironic then that Dyson’s single greatest professional achievement, helping to formulate the new quantum electrodynamics, was the work of a unifier.
Townes’s work with radar, microwaves, lasers, astronomy, and defense issues made him a superb diversifier. He was a tinkerer. No one could be sure how experiments would come out; that’s why they were experiments. One can’t fully predict what practical uses could be made of discoveries. Indeed, when Townes and others had invented the laser they weren’t quite sure at first what do with it.
So how can Dyson talk about the future of science? He can’t. No one can. He gripped the lectern as if bracing himself for the historical events coming our way. “The way to learn about the history of science,” he said at the end of his talk, “is to stay alive as long as you can and see what happens.”
GREENLAND, 2007
When in 1966 Dyson was interviewed by Stanley Kubrick for the segment that was eventually cut from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dyson predicted that for pushing space exploration forward advances in an understanding of biology would be more important than advances in electronics. It would be useful, Dyson said then, in historian-of-the-future fashion, to make machines from biological materials.9 What is a “biological material”?
We still aren’t sure. Forty years later Dyson found himself in Greenland at a meeting devoted not to climate change, as you might expect, but to biological materials, although by then the preferred name was synthetic life. The gathering in this exotic place was kept small to about twenty scientists, including Steven Chu, then the director of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and later U.S. energy secretary.
The Greenland meeting looked at the prospective merging of nano- and biotechnologies for doing such things as re-engineering bacteria to make fuel or tailored pharmaceuticals. Naturally the effort to invent hybrid life-forms had an ethical component, and a session was devoted to scientists playing God. Dyson contributed to all the discussions but was particularly keen on the subject of the potential benefits and dangers of bioengineering as it applied to public health and the food supply.
The consensus report emerging from the meeting pointed to the growing ability to map genomes and to construct deliberate genetic sequences for the purpose of making functioning single-cell factories.10 Could these scientists predict when bio-factories will come about? No. But only three years after the Greenland meeting, in May of 2010, biotech entrepreneur Craig Venter and his colleagues reported in Science that they had created an artificial genome and placed it into an already living bacterium, which then replicated to form a succession of new cells using the assumed genome as blueprint. Venter went so far as to say that the cells constituted “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”11
Biologists were generally impressed with Venter’s work, but many did not exactly consider that a living organism had been created from scratch, since the host cell had grown naturally. Asked his rapid opinion of Venter’s achievement, Dyson said that Venter’s experiment had been clumsy but that it was important work, as it was a big step toward creating new forms of life.12
Should we make new forms of life? Should humans appropriate the godly role of creator? Dyson the philosopher has declared himself many times: it is part of our human destiny to make this the most interesting universe possible, and evidently this involves making more life and spreading life through the cosmos.
LISBON, 2007
Freeman Dyson’s career has passed through several phases. First came the Knaben Physik phase when, in his mid-twenties, he helped build the new quantum electrodynamics. Then came the Tom Swift phase of gee-whiz engineering in the 1950s: TRIGA, Orion, Dyson spheres. The 1960s to the 1980s was Dyson’s Metternich diplomatic phase, featuring nuclear treaties, Jason activity, and the Vietnam War. After that came the Emerson phase, featuring elegant essays on dozens of topics. Next came the Jeremiah phase of prophetic-heretical writing and preaching. All of these personas are present in the man in his present historian-philosopher-storyteller phase.
Dyson was invited to a meeting in Lisbon called “Is Science Nearing Its Limits?” His talk was unsurprisingly entitled, “Science Is Nowhere Near Its Limits.” Look at history, he said. Oswald Spengler, in his 1918 book, The Decline of the West, got just about everything wrong, especially scientific things. Spengler argued that physics had played itself out. Instead, within one little decade, Heisenberg’s quantum revolution, Einstein’s relativity revolution, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem had cracked the bedrock of established knowledge, leading to a new golden age of mathematics and physics.
At least half of Dyson’s Lisbon talk was devoted to refuting point for point the assertions of the conference’s organizer, George Steiner, who is better known as a literary critic. Steiner argued, for example, that science, with increasing specialization within subdisciplines, was losing its universal language. Look at history, Dyson said again. Many regretted the apparent loss of unity when scientists, in the early nineteenth century, switched from using Latin to using their several national languages. Science got over it.
But what about all those subdisciplines? Dyson granted that many researchers were pursuing ever smaller areas of knowledge. But there is a compensating advantage in the growing internationalism of science, in the availability of new research tools such as Google and Wikipedia, and in the start-up of so many interdisciplinary insti
tutes.13
How can science be reaching its limits, Dyson asked, when so many fundamental things—the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the properties of dark energy—need explaining? “Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.”14
GALÁPAGOS, 2008
Imme and Freeman celebrated their golden wedding anniversary by taking a trip to the Galápagos Islands. This is where scientific history was made. Over geologic ages the finches on these islands had splintered into many species long before Charles Darwin arrived to gaze at them and gain his central insights about natural selection. Still comparatively wild, these volcanic outposts in the Pacific continue to be a laboratory for studying evolution in real time. Can Dyson, or anyone, write the future history of these islands or their birds? No. The swing in weather—dry one year, wet the next—is too great.
Mr. and Mrs. Dyson were there to relax. No lectures this time, no scientific sessions to attend. Imme snorkeled while Freeman read. To human eyes the place is placid and beautiful. But nature is rather cavalier with life and death. From the railing of the cruise ship, the vacationers saw a deadly drama unfold. A sea turtle, one that Imme had viewed earlier that day while she swam in the ocean, was rushed by an orca (that’s Freeman’s recollection; Imme remembers it as a shark), which easily shattered the turtle’s shell, leaving the sea flush with blood and covered with scavenger birds.15 Death by sea, life by land: the couple strolled for miles past albatrosses sitting on eggs, the males and females taking turns. The birds were as thick, Freeman thought, as humans in Manhattan.
Aside from visiting the Galápagos in person, Freeman converted his observations into writing. In his critique of a book about the place in the New York Review of Books he lamented the book’s tone, with its prediction that the islands would assume one of two extremes, either as a preserved wilderness free of humans or as a vulgar resort crammed with honeymooners at the density of albatrosses. Which way will it go? Dyson can’t be sure, but he believes we can steer a middle course.16
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