Maverick Genius

by Phillip F. Schewe

  KAZAKHSTAN, 2009

  In one of Dyson’s most important self-chosen roles—prophet of space travel—he has been stymied. He is an armchair explorer, pointing the way across the galaxy but not going there himself. He designed a nuclear spacecraft and hoped to travel personally as far as Saturn. The first steps into deep space, in cosmic terms only baby steps, are into Earth orbit, then the Moon, then further out into the solar system.

  Where the father fell short perhaps the daughter could succeed. But first, Esther needed Freeman’s advice. She was a rushed businesswoman and didn’t have a lot of spare time. She’d helped to found or had invested in such companies as FedEx and the Russian equivalent of Google. She sat on several boards of directors. Her travel schedule took her to another city, if not out of the country, every week. The question was this: should she put this all on hold, she asked her father, in order to go to Russia and train there for six months to be a cosmonaut and possibly be hurled into space from a launch site in Central Asia?

  Freeman had long supported his eldest child in whatever she’d attempted. Now he positively glowed. Going into space? His own good-natured frustration at not traveling off Earth had crept into dozens of essays. Here was a chance for his firstborn to arrive at—if not exactly Saturn—at least low Earth orbit. He was thrilled. She made up her mind to do it.17

  Even if she came up to full qualification, the odds were against her actually going into orbit. She was to pay $3 million for the training and for the contingency that if the designated tourist-class flier, Charles Simonyi, was unable to proceed then she would go in his stead, and cough up another $30 million or so. All of this was arranged by a company called Space Adventures, in which Esther was an investor. Simonyi, a former Microsoft executive, was a friend of Esther’s and also happened to chair the board of directors at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was rich enough and hardy enough to be going now on his second orbital voyage.

  In March 2009 Esther and the other cosmonauts went from their training base at Star City near Moscow to the launch facility at Baikonur in Kazakhstan. As part of her space adventure, Esther was allowed a small entourage of bystanders, which included Freeman, Imme, and George Dyson. On this occasion, Simonyi did fly, Esther did not, but all agreed that the effort had been worthwhile.

  Other events along the way: Freeman slipped on the ice and smashed himself, leaving blue bruises all around his face. He gave a lecture in Moscow. He and Imme were nearly arrested at the Moscow airport when a bottle containing a mysterious substance was discovered in their luggage. At first they claimed not to know what it was. Later it was recognized to be a ceremonial sample of soil from the space site. Esther, with a million things to bring home, wanted the dirt but didn’t have room for it in her own suitcases. It was confiscated.18

  CHICAGO, 2010

  Saxons and Normans built cathedrals in Winchester. Eventually we might build cathedrals on comets, cathedrals made of warm-blooded biological materials, cathedrals providing shelter and food and energy and perhaps some new spiritual nourishment for future space colonists. How and when could this happen? We can’t say. Space flights from Kazakhstan and Cape Canaveral only began a few decades ago.

  In Chicago Dyson spoke at a meeting called the International Space Development Conference. He shared top billing with a couple of astronauts, including a man who has gone as far away from Earth as any human has ever gone, Buzz Aldrin, the second man to stand on the Moon. Dyson’s speech covered such by now familiar themes as the need for new propulsion systems—how about using lasers? We should not attempt to adapt remote planet or comet surfaces to our human needs, but rather we should adapt human habits to those environments. Ask not how we can change Europa but how Europa can change us.

  For doing these things long-term thinking is required, a thing Russians are more inclined to than Americans, an opinion informed by Dyson’s pilgrimage to Baikonur and seventy years of studying Russian culture. Esther didn’t get to visit the International Space Station, but is confident that she will get into space or at least take a suborbital joyride in the next ten years. She believes that NASA will get out of the “truck driving” part of space travel, the ferrying of supplies up and down. This will allow private entrepreneurs to thrive in the business of hauling freight and paying passengers into suborbital trajectories or low Earth orbit at first and later to more distant destinations like the Moon and even Mars.19

  Freeman Dyson was the president of the Space Studies Institute, an organization dedicated to the commercialization of space. In response to congressional hearings on a NASA funding bill, Dyson and his fellow SSI officers wrote an open letter calling on Congress to provide funds for “pre-competition research,” which would lead to commercial space activities in such areas as launch vehicles, satellite solar power, and even manufacturing and mining on planets and our Moon.20

  WASHINGTON, 2011

  In April 2011 Dyson was the star at another space event. He received the lifetime achievement award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation at a banquet in Washington, D.C. Clarke was of course the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and other science fiction novels but was also an important early promoter of satellites. The glamour of the manned missions to the Moon helped establish space exploration as an exciting frontier. What made space a successful commercial enterprise, however, was satellites, those ubiquitous overhead sentinels that monitor storms, keep military bases under surveillance, supply customers with their ground locations to within centimeters or less, and transmit television shows around the globe. The foundation’s ceremony took place in a large room whose ceiling was hung with full-size satellite specimens as if they were display items in a natural history museum. Indeed, satellites have come to be seen as if they were natural objects, like jungle birds, roosting overhead.

  Before the awards part of the evening, a short video of Clarke was shown. Speaking on the occasion of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City, Clarke said that it was impossible to predict the course of technological innovation. The things you can predict now, he said, probably won’t happen. The things that will happen you couldn’t have imagined. So, Clarke impishly said, if you want to predict the future you have to imagine the unimaginable.

  Predicting the unpredictable is one of Freeman Dyson’s habits, especially when it comes to the spread of life from Earth to the rest of the solar system. How will this prospective Mayflower-scale migration come about? Gray technology will provide space hardware that can transport us to planets and comets. Green technology will provide hardy organisms—eventually including us—adapted to low vacuum, low temperature, and low gravity. To do any of this, however, costs have to come down.

  The man speaking before Dyson at the Clarke event hopes to do exactly that. There to accept the foundation’s Innovator Award was Elon Musk, who had founded PayPal (a company delivering Internet paying services) and Tesla Motors (featuring sporty all-electric automobiles). Musk was on hand because his third great venture is SpaceX, whose chief products are Falcon, a rocket designed to deliver payloads to Earth orbit more cheaply than NASA has ever done, and Dragon, the first private spacecraft to have orbited Earth and then returned safely. The company expects Dragon to ferry goods and probably astronauts to space stations.

  When Dyson finally spoke, the first thing he did was to apologize for being anticlimactic. Elon Musk, Dyson said, was the real thing. Musk delivered a useful product, while he, Dyson, was there only to talk about a dream.

  He read his speech in a loud, clear voice, with occasional percussive effects at moments needing emphasis. Dyson’s appearance—age accentuating the angularity, with elfin ears pointing up, aquiline nose pointing down, and hair swiping diagonally across the forehead—revealed a man who is old but who, at least audibly, was still the precocious schoolboy, eager to have you hear his prize essay and embrace his vision.

  Politely fitting his remarks to the occasion, Dyson began with a story. He spoke of his last encounter with Arthur C. Clarke, at a meeting
in Colorado in 2003. Actually Clarke was not present in person. Instead, his 3D holographic image was fed across the world by satellite from Sri Lanka, where he lived, to the hall in Colorado, where Dyson and others could greet him. They too, one at a time, were encoded as holograms for Clarke to see at the other end.

  Then Dyson got to the main part of his award acceptance speech. His well-rehearsed theme was his vision of life spreading from Earth into the cosmos, of life invading matter. On this occasion he offered a new enunciation of his spacetraveler’s manifesto. He spoke of the “biosphere genome,” his name for the collectively mapped genomes of all known species on Earth. He expected this map to be compiled over the next few decades. This would be the most important database on Earth, about a petabyte of data, large but smaller than some commercial information troves such as Google. It would be able to fit onto a storage device the size of an egg. It is this “biosphere egg” that Dyson wants to dispatch into other worlds where, with proper development, it could implant life. Away from competing with nature’s own course here on our home planet, a new biosphere could deploy itself at leisure.

  Why plant such a seedling on another world—or, more likely, on some lower-gravity object like a passing comet or asteroid? Well, we would do it for the same reason that we plant a bulb in a kitchen window flowerpot: for the beauty or as a bit of decoration, but chiefly we would do it because it represents living things, things to be nurtured.

  Understanding the biosphere genome—the total web of life as we know it at the basic level of genes—will, Dyson argues, “be the transforming event of human history in the twenty-first century.” This event will be so significant that Dyson gives it a grandiose name: The Turn. The Turn is not the point at which we understand life. It’s the point at which we use nature’s own tools to design new ecologies and new species. “We will make mistakes” in the process, he admits, but we’ll learn from these mistakes. There is no going back. “The future will be different from the past.”21

  PRINCETON, 2013

  The man who once claimed to prefer the eighteenth century to the twentieth, at least when it came to fostering ties between scientific and humanistic values, has now lived well into the twenty-first century. Is he slowing down? Dyson in his upper eighties is slower than Dyson in his seventies. But by octogenarian standards he is active.

  Dyson has consorted with lots of people in his long life. He has friends he made through Imme’s long-distance running events; he has flower friends (Imme and Freeman usually attend the annual Flower Show in Philadelphia); business friends he met through Esther; colleagues at the Institute and nearby Princeton University. He has biologist friends, Peace Action friends, physics friends, and astronomer friends.

  He continues to attend Jason’s summer meetings in La Jolla, California. He now carries the designation of senior advisor. According to Roy Schwitters, the current chairman of the Jason steering committee, “Dyson’s need-to-know status is reviewed periodically. Needless to say, we much value Freeman’s continuing contributions.” Jason sports an increasing number of non-physicists, and the research topics include more biological and computer subjects. But nuclear stockpile stewardship seems to be the number one concern. The opinion of Jason thinkers is that the warheads in the U.S. arsenal will be viable for the foreseeable future.22

  Dyson approaches his nineties but goes to work most days. What he sees around his room, when not putting words on his computer screen, are pictures of children and grandchildren, and stacks of papers. Books fill shelves the long length of the room and are piled three feet high from the floor up. Books reside on top of filing cabinets. They include translations of his own compositions: Chinese and Italian versions are visible. The blackboard at the end of the room is covered with equations and the inscription “Do not erase.”

  The man who gives lectures up and down the land is still shy. When eating lunch, he sometimes sits by himself in the cafeteria. At the 3:30 tea held in the lobby of Fuld Hall, he might stand alone until approached by a young scholar with questions. On some days he is joined by Imme and friends after work at Harry’s Bar, the Institute’s own watering hole.

  His two most recent books are The Scientist as Rebel (2006), largely filled with articles from The New York Review of Books, and A Many-Colored Glass (2007), consisting of lectures delivered at a variety of universities. These pieces generally line up with classic Dysonic interests: nuclear weapons, heretical thinking, biotech, the complementary roles of science and religion in understanding the universe, and of course his essential Mayflowering theme—the destiny of humans, or some subsequent intelligent species, to spread across the galaxy.

  Dyson can’t seem to say no when asked to write introductions to other people’s books. We’ve seen a few examples already: a new edition of Olaf Stapledon’s novel Star Maker and a book about ESP. Here are others: a gathering of letters by Richard Feynman; a book about astronomer Thomas Gold; a book of Einstein’s writings; a book of Einstein quotations; a book by Clement Durell, Dyson’s math teacher at Winchester College, about special relativity; a book about physicist Joseph Rotblat; and a 2010 collection of science essays by other writers.

  Dyson, as undertaker, has provided numerous obituaries of great scientists, especially if they were friends of his: Hans Bethe, Paul Dirac, Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, Ted Taylor, and John von Neumann. One of the best of these remembrances was of Princeton physicist John Wheeler, an important quantum thinker and Richard Feynman’s graduate advisor. Dyson, as if writing about himself, extolled Wheeler for his complementary virtues of being both conservative and rebel in his research. Wheeler was both an expert calculator of things that could be measured in the lab and a creative dreamer of new ideas; he coined the term “black hole.” Wheeler’s writing combined the best of prose and poetry. Dyson lets you know that he prefers the poetic side of Wheeler.23

  The heart of Dyson’s writing since the mid-1990s has been his contributions to The New York Review of Books. In approaching his reviewing assignment, Dyson paces about the house or office. Then, when he has ordered all his chosen points, he sits and writes out the entire piece. His wife often reads a draft. Here is a sprinkling of late-appearing Dyson reviews and some of the stories he tells along the way.

  Writing about Richard Holmes’s book The Age of Wonder, Dyson said he looked forward to a new Romantic Age when science and the arts would be allies again in exploring the universe. He tells the story of his participation in a festival in Rome featuring scientists and artists.24

  Reviewing James Gleick’s The Information, Dyson lamented that as the speed and volume of data flow increased our ability to make sense of it all was being challenged. “It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.”25 As Dyson likes to say, information is cheap while meaning is expensive.

  In a piece about David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, about science, philosophy, and human destiny, Dyson says that philosophy can be classified as a branch of science or as a category of literature. He prefers his philosophy to be literary. “Deutsch becomes a true philosopher when he forgets his technical arguments and tells evocative stories.”26

  Dyson’s yearning for literary wisdom also shows up in his review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, about how the human mind processes information and arrives at impressions. Dyson likes the book but chides Kahneman for neglecting to mention either Sigmund Freud or William James, whom Dyson regards not as scientists but as artists. Kahneman, Dyson suggests, helped to make psychology an experimental science, while Freud “made psychology a branch of literature, with stories and myths that appeal to the heart rather than to the mind.”27

  Finally, writing about Lake Views, a collection of essays by Steven Weinberg, gave Dyson one more chance (probably not the last) to spar with his longtime friend. The two have repeatedly bumped up against each other over the years. Dyson has made repea
ted reference to Weinberg’s famous dictum, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” So it is ironic that Dyson should refer to Weinberg, an outspoken atheist, as a man of faith. According to Dyson, Weinberg’s “faith” is for the existence of a Final Theory, a comprehensive mathematical formalism that will account for physical phenomena in the universe, and a belief that humans can uncover this theory through thinking and experimenting.

  “I think he overrates the capacity of the human mind to comprehend the totality of nature,” Dyson said. “I find the idea of a Final Theory repugnant because it diminishes both the richness of nature and the richness of human destiny. I prefer to live in a universe full of inexhaustible mysteries and to belong to a species destined for inexhaustible intellectual growth.”28

  DELPHIC ORACLE

  Freeman Dyson loves to speak at colleges, where he is often accorded reverence approaching that reserved for the Dalai Lama. Even if you disagree with his view on climate change or string theory or religion or ESP, you expect him to say something interesting. You don’t want to miss hearing the Delphic Oracle. So if a poster goes up announcing a campus appearance of Freeman Dyson, then buy tickets quickly.

  In December 2009 Dyson was at the University of Portland to talk about the relation of science and society, a broad area of concern that includes some of his favorite topics. Two days later he was scheduled to talk at the physics department of the University of Oregon. He went to dinner with some of his hosts but was too ill to eat. After some vomiting he took a nap on a couch at the university. A huge crowd had filled the lecture hall, but the organizers were prepared to call off the event. Dyson woke up and claimed he was ready to proceed.