Maverick Genius

by Phillip F. Schewe

  He did what speakers are supposed to do. He put his audience at ease by telling them a nice tale of his childhood days sporting through the medieval halls and over the manicured lawns. As a college brat, the son of a teacher at the school, his pleasant memories of the place began long before he was a student. He quoted his mother: “Education is what is left over after you have forgotten everything you ever learned.” In that sense, Dyson said, the most valuable education he’d gotten at the college was a feeling for style. He was referring to the classical authors taught at the school, such as Tacitus and Horace, but he might also have had in mind the style of his admired thinkers such as Feynman and Stapledon.

  The rest of Dyson’s speech was not what his audience had been expecting. He reminded them that the 1930s (his years at Winchester), like the 1960s, was a time of student rebellion against received ideas. He loved Winchester College, he said, for fostering friendships and for demanding intellectual rigor from its students. But he felt other emotions too:

  I hated the College for perpetuating the privilege of the ruling class. I hated it because it separated me from the mass of English people outside the sacred walls. I left the College in 1941 with the battle between love and hatred unresolved. I was not a loyal Wykemhamist. I left England and was glad to raise my children in America, partly to escape from the culture of boarding schools in which I had grown up. I sent my children to an American public day-school and did not need to think about sending them to Winchester.40

  If Dyson had dismayed his listeners, he quickly made amends. He admitted that after fifty years, the hate was gone and only the love remained. He praised Winchester for its emphasis on academic excellence and for not being merely a “training ground for the rulers of a vanished empire.” He regularly read the school newsletter, and was happy to see that the virtues that had made Winchester such an exemplary institution were still at work: insisting on unsparing honesty, maintaining historical perspective, and promulgating a splendid literary style.

  Dyson had come back to Winchester, he said, as a prodigal son. “You are forgiving me for my disloyalty, for abandoning King and country at a time of hardship and rationed bread, for going away to live among the fleshpots of America. I am profoundly grateful for your forgiveness.” He was again proud to be a Wykehamist.

  CATHEDRAL

  Freeman Dyson’s winning the Templeton Prize took many people by surprise, including Dyson himself. At that time the Templeton Foundation gave its yearly prize for “progress in religion” and pegged the monetary value of the prize to be slightly ahead of that for the Nobel Prize. On May 9, 2000, Prince Philip, presented the prize to Dyson at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace. This was followed a week later by a public ceremony at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. In receiving a million dollars, Dyson may have lost his amateur status as a theologian.

  The National Cathedral is the largest and most resonant Gothic space in Washington. In Dyson’s acceptance speech he sounded the themes that presumably had won him the award: that good works, such as helping the poor, are better than volumes of theology; that both science and religion are exciting because they grapple with mysteries; that God and mind, to his way of thinking, are one and actively present simultaneously at the microscopic level of atoms, at the macroscopic level of human beings, and at the cosmic level of the universe itself; that green technology, such as biotech and solar power, is reexerting its primacy over gray technology, such as machines and fossil fuels; that the marketing of high-tech goods and the capitalist system in general, useful as they may be, must be tempered by ethics; that this attention to social justice will both help to alleviate human misery and enlarge the global economy; and that we must utilize both windows, science and religion, if we’re going to get a better view of our immense universe.41

  How can you win a religion award and not be religious? Dyson’s family upbringing had been middle-brow, nondogmatic Anglican. He claimed to have had no intense religious experiences during his long life, with the exception of his fervent and short-lived invention of Cosmic Unity as a fourteen-year-old. When he attends a church service, it is really “more for the music and the fellowship than for what you actually learn.” He views the Christian Bible as literature.42

  Was Dyson the new Haldane, promoting an ethical role for science? Was he the new Emerson, promoting a transcendental view of the world, one which said that vast realms of reality lay outside the scope of science? Was he a new William James urging us to appreciate the religious frame of mine? Or was he trying to take science backward? Was he trying to reinstate the eighteenth- or seventeenth-century collaboration of scientific and religious feeling? Was he actually saying that atoms behaved as if they had a life of their own rather than being inanimate objects buffeted by inanimate forces? Doesn’t this un-install the materialist perspective that has brought so much clarity into the study of chemistry, physics, and biology over the past three centuries?

  Plenty of his fellow scientists, even those who respect his research achievements or his ethical outlook, wonder about Dyson’s love affair with religious sensibilities. Richard Dawkins, for example, reacted to Dyson’s Templeton speech with mockery. He felt that Dyson’s high stature, coupled with his perceived alliance with religion, would only encourage a belief in superstition. Dyson responded by lamenting Dawkins’s harsh tone toward religion, which could drive away some students who might otherwise have considered scientific careers. Dawkins, famous for his own rigorous theory of the universe—the biological side of it, anyway—as being built from the ground up from patently inanimate atoms and ruthlessly selfish genes, questions Dyson’s equating of God and mind. Dawkins, author of a book called The God Delusion, asks Dyson for evidence of God’s existence. Dawkins much prefers Einstein’s agnostic formula for God: “a name we give to that which we don’t yet understand.”43

  What kind of a theologian is Dyson? Dawkins helpfully outlines a spectrum of theological perspectives. A theist, Dawkins says, believes in a supernatural intelligence that created the world and who goes on intervening in human affairs. A deist, on Dawkins’s chart, also requires a supernatural creator, but one who does not intervene in subsequent times. A pantheist—Spinoza and Einstein are examples—does not see a supernatural God at work, but uses the word God as a metaphor for nature or for the universe. “Pantheism is sexed-up atheism,” says Dawkins. “Deism is watered-down theism.”44 By these rules, Dyson should probably be placed somewhere between a pantheist and a deist whose God is a kind of meta-scientific, collective consciousness.

  Dyson teems with metaphors for this consciousness: “The universe is like a fertile soil spread out all around us, ready for the seeds of mind to sprout and grow. Ultimately, late or soon, mind … will come into its heritage.”45

  What a strange career Dyson has had. Many people knew of the mathematician but not the engineer. Some had read of Dyson the physicist but not Dyson the diplomat. They had read Disturbing the Universe but not Infinite in All Directions. They might have known about Orion and TRIGA but not about Socinus. Then came the Templeton Prize. If for the sake of argument we could consider it to be the theological equivalent of the Nobel Prize, then Dyson’s Nobel-worthy work would have been his Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, and his essays collected into books over the previous twenty years.

  Dyson had not won the million-dollar physics Nobel for his work in explaining away the infinities that arise when you get closer and closer to an electron, an accomplishment relying on an artful redefinition of the mass and charge of the electron. But he had won the comparably endowed prize for explaining the disparities that arise when you use science to explain the whole universe, physical and moral. Dyson’s attempt at smoothing over potential conflicts between science and religion had swept the apparent incompatibility not under the carpet but out beyond the edge of the universe.

  Emerson, 150 years ago, outlined a position similar to Dyson’s: “The human mind seems a lens formed to concentrate the rays of the Divine l
aws to a focus, which shall be the personality of God. But that focus falls so far into the infinite that the form or person of God is not within the ken of mind.”46

  17. Splintering the Species

  Dyson as Heretic

  (1990–2010)

  Does Freeman Dyson tell the truth? Not that we expect him to tell falsehoods, but does he, in the moral sense, speak true? Does he see things, inconvenient facts that others overlook?

  On several important topics, as we’ll see, he is out of step with mainstream scientific opinion. About the origin of life, about carbon dioxide emissions, about the desirability of human space travel, or about reconciling religion and science, Dyson is heretical. If possible he avoids being part of a majority.1

  We might admire him for his courage to be different, but is he right? Is he seeing the true essence of these issues? Is he speaking truth to power? Is he a prophet, or is he just a cranky old man freed by tenure and now by retirement to say anything he wants?

  Indeed, he allows himself to say in print what others might hold back. Some of what he says is disagreeable, although he himself is not a disagreeable personality. Lawrence Krauss has enormous respect for Dyson, but found that during their friendly arguments over cosmology Dyson seemed instinctively to take issue with most prevailing opinions about the universe.2 Princeton physicist William Happer observes that at Jason meetings if a vote is being taken on some proposition and if a lone voice stands against the majority, that dissenter will usually be Dyson. But Happer sees Dyson as a hero for holding to his opposition opinions, especially on the issue of climate change, about which Dyson and Happer share many views.

  Another Jason, Henry Abarbanel, is amused by Dyson’s contrariety, but says that Dyson is never dogmatic. Rather, he is soft-spoken, patient in hearing others’ views, unfailingly polite, almost shy. Nevertheless, once Dyson begins to speak, he likes to lay out a clear case. Abarbanel insists that Dyson’s waywardness isn’t objectionable if you stop to examine his line of reasoning. That’s exactly what we’ll do in this chapter.

  A person who goes against consensus on important issues is called a heretic. If, furthermore, the contrarian vision proves to be apt—if the heretical portent comes to pass—then we call him a prophet. Prophecy is retrospective.

  Our modern cliché image of prophecy is of a gnarled man with long beard holding burnable views who foretells unpleasant events. Dyson denies being a prophet. He disdains “futurology” as a bogus science. Knowing many scientific and engineering principles, he does, however, try to arrive at some estimations of where present science and technology are taking us. This chapter will consequently investigate his provisional status as a prophet, at least in the generic sense of him being a person who, at the risk of being ostracized or taken as a fool, attempts to speak true.

  What is truth? Daniel Dennett argues that scientists try to settle the truth of a dispute with facts and further statistical analysis. Experiments are for “discovering the truth (not the capital ‘T’ truth about everything, but just the ho-hum truth about this particular little factual disagreement).”3 Dyson certainly revels in these little-t truths—such as measuring the whereabouts of an electron with a detector—but he doesn’t shy away from large-T truths.

  The Bible is filled with stories about the search for Truth. The Hebrew prophets held a vision of what a just society should be and presumed to tell others what God expects of people. Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, and Isaiah spoke during the centuries when the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were menaced by the Assyrian and Babylonian empires to the north and east. But the real problem, as the Hebrew prophets saw the matter, was the backsliding of the Israelite tribes. In their religious observance they devoted too much attention to ritual and not enough to righteousness. The prophets didn’t so much “prophesy” the future as anticipate the disasters coming about through the short-sighted actions of the nation. The prophets weren’t magicians, but they were inspired to enunciate a vision of a better life and how to achieve it.

  The Hebrew prophets dispensed their visions from places like the temple in Jerusalem or the Ishtar Gate in Babylon. Freeman Dyson’s platform for speaking truth, since the mid-1990s, has been The New York Review of Books (NYRB). This is the finest literary publication in the United States because it recruits the best writers to review the best books. Actually not all of the books have to be the best but only good enough to prompt a lively 4,000-word sally by a reviewer who is frequently more interesting to read than the book under scrutiny. So it is with many of the reviews by Dyson.

  Dyson does more than review. He preaches, gently but persistently. It’s time now to see how his long-ruminated considered opinions have coalesced into several set piece sermons. It’s time to start summing up Reverend Dyson’s career. What hand of heretic or prophet is he? Assyria no longer looms as a threat. Instead, other challenging issues absorb his interest. We’ll look at four topics where Dyson presents not just views but visions: consciousness, climate, biotech, and the prospective peopling of the solar system.

  EXTRAORDINARY KNOWING

  Freeman Dyson had read about Uri Geller and wanted to see him in action. So in 1973 he and his family came to the show in San Diego. Geller advertised an ability to bend spoons and keys through psychic force, a claim that could fill an auditorium with curious people.

  When Geller asked for a volunteer, Dyson’s twelve-year-old daughter, Emily, gamely went up on stage with a key she’d brought from home. Geller held the key briefly, gave it back to Emily and, while she waited there patiently, he went on to explain how he could interfere with the atoms in the key using his special powers. When Emily was asked to produce the key again, there it was, bent! The performance continued with Geller undertaking further astonishing things with volunteers. Then he left.

  The second half of the show fell to James Randi, a magician who goes by the name of the Amazing Randi. Randi proceeded to do the same things Geller had done, such as bending keys. The difference was that Randi explained how it was done. An able magician can palm the volunteer’s key and return a substitute. Then, while talking to the audience, he secretly bends the key. Through further sleight of hand he returns the original key to the volunteer, who, along with the audience, is amazed when the now bent key is revealed.

  Dyson related this anecdote many years later in a NYRB review of the book Debunked! by Henri Broch, whom Dyson identifies as the French equivalent to the Amazing Randi, and Georges Charpak, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist. The book recounts examples of faulty statistical reasoning or outright fraud in the making of paranormal claims about otherwise unexplained phenomena, especially in the area of extrasensory perception (ESP). Dyson makes it plain that he approves of scientific proof and disapproves of fraud.4

  Then he does something unexpected. After praising Charpak and Broch for their rigor, Dyson criticizes them for going too far. They go too far in dismissing paranormal phenomena, a category that includes such things as ESP. Dyson concedes that no scientific experiment has found evidence for ESP so far. But that doesn’t mean it can’t exist. Telepathy, communication between minds without the use of the five known senses, has not yet swayed the dials of scientific metering equipment. Maybe the equipment is unsuitable or ESP is too evanescent to be captured by scientific means.5 Dyson gently chides the authors of Debunked! for not admitting these possibilities.

  This is not what scientists want to hear—that certain phenomena are out of reach of measurement. Indeed, the history of science provides a high-contrast map of staked-out physical, chemical, biological, and psychological territory. One can say thousands of things about genes, volcanoes, electrons, and polar bears. Dyson himself has contributed to this cornucopia of knowledge. But not everything can be mapped, especially in the mental universe. How do you measure love or fear or jealousy?

  Actually, Dyson doesn’t say that there are subjects off limits to science, subjects that aren’t open to scientific scrutiny. Rather, for many subjects there may be other ways of kno
wing that are perpendicular to the ways of science. His invocation of Niels Bohr’s complementarity concept is crucial in the case of ESP. Just as light can be studied as waves and as particles but not both ways at the same time, so mental phenomena, Dyson argues, can be viewed with science, and with other means (art, religion, and so on), but not at the same time.6 Emily Dickinson’s poem about the brain doesn’t help the neurologist; conversely, brain surgery says nothing about the insights inspired by Dickinson’s poem. But together we get a fuller picture of the mental universe.

  Dyson tells us in a postscript that his NYRB article called forth numerous letters to the editor, many from scientists outraged that he should have allowed that telepathy might exist, and many from ESP believers outraged by his assertion that proof of telepathy was still lacking. Thus Dyson remains happily in the middle, scorned, or at least questioned, by partisans on both sides. Niels Bohr’s quantum principle of complementarity engendered a school of thought, referred to as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum reality. By contrast, Dyson’s principle of mental complementarity has few followers. His regard for the ineluctability of conscious activity will not likely be referred to as the “Princeton interpretation.”

  As a concession to orthodox scientific thinking, Dyson can cast his notion of ESP into practical technology. If you prefer thinking of ESP as being implemented with transmitters and receivers implanted in human brains, he can oblige you. A fleet of a hundred thousand implanted devices, he suggests, could dispatch the signals sent out by the hundred billion neurons making up a typical brain. All we needed, but didn’t yet have, was the mechanism for converting neural signals into radio signals and the means for embedding so vast a broadcast array within sensitive brain tissue. “A society bonded by radiotelepathy,” he says, “would experience human life in a totally new way.”7