And proceed he did in the form of an extensive question-and-answer dialogue. He touched upon his days at General Atomic, a company he claimed was to the 1950s what Google is now—an exciting place to work since fresh ideas could be turned into action. Asked about string theory, Dyson said he respected it but figured that we didn’t need 10,000 string theorists. About 1,000 would be enough. Bioengineering of flowers and lizards? Yes. Of humans? No, not yet. We need to go slow. Was he religious? Not particularly, although he did relish mystery in the universe. Unanswered questions kept the human race on the move.
Had Dyson’s illness in Oregon been a passing virus? For the previous two weeks he’d been staying at the home of his daughter Rebecca, the radiologist, in northern California. He’d been listless the whole time, unlike his usual self. Right after the Oregon event he visited his other physician daughter, Emily, the cardiologist, in San Diego. There they finally figured out what was wrong. No one had thought to measure his pulse. It was ticking along at only 30 beats per minute. Freeman received a pacemaker, felt much better immediately, and returned safely to his home in Princeton.29
It wasn’t yet time for Dyson to die. But occasionally he thinks about mortality. He thinks back to that startling Tolystoyan moment decades before when he was mugged near the National Academy, when he was left bleeding underneath a bush, when his most vivid impression was not the pain of the injury to his skull but the joy of seeing and appreciating the greenness of the leaves all about and the blueness of the sky. “Perhaps, when death comes,” Dyson said when he recalled the event, “he will once again come as a friend.”30
It takes equanimity to say something like that. This sentiment appeared in an essay Dyson contributed to an anthology called Living Philosophies.31 Dyson’s essay was devoted, not surprisingly, to drawing out the widest hierarchy of perspective. First, he said, there is the individual, whose purview is measured in years. Next are families, which stretch out across decades; then tribes and nations over centuries; then culture, over a millennium; then the human species over tens and hundreds of millennia; and finally life on Earth over billions of years. No wonder any single person had divided loyalties, since he or she encountered life as part of all these inclusive realms.32
Dyson recalls several walks he took with his mother around Winchester in her final years (she died at the age of ninety-four). In the distance were the medieval buildings, the gardens, and the cathedral. She liked visiting a particular cemetery, but was mostly cheerful on these walks. Mother and son discussed Freeman’s boyhood idea of Cosmic Unity. “She imagined that she was herself a piece of the world soul that had been given freedom to grow and develop independently as long as she was alive,” said Dyson about his mother’s attitude. “After death, she expected to merge back into the world soul, losing her personal identity but preserving her memories and her intelligence.”33
Death is in our future. Every tombstone has a start date and a stop date. Amid his biology career in the 1980s, Dyson had declared that death was one of the more important innovations in history. Without death there wouldn’t be room for the new creatures that keep coming along. “Life had to invent death to evolve.”34
As Richard Feynman was dying of cancer, he told a friend—in an anecdote retold by Freeman Dyson—that the thought of death wasn’t as bothersome as you’d think. “I’ve told most of the good stuff,” Feynman said, “so I’m ready to go.” Dyson feels the same way. If anything Dyson’s greatest fear, on the subject of mortality, is related to the very biotech progress he has been promoting for many years. “One of the worst disasters would be if biologists find a cure for death,” Dyson said. “I worry about this.”35
THE DYSONS THEN
The death of death is not expected soon. Nor the death of the Dyson tribe. Here, for the record, is a succession of Dyson sons and fathers. Freeman Dyson (born 1923), a scientist, is son of George (1883–1964), a musician; who was a son of John (1859–1923), a blacksmith; son of Jeremiah (1835–1900), a painter and wallpaper hanger; son of John (b. 1810), a butcher; son of Thomas (b. 1782), an innkeeper; son of George (b. 1755), who established the Stirk Bridge Inn near Halifax, which still stands. He was son of John (b. 1725), son of Henry (b. 1678), son of Henry (b. 1636), son of Simeon (b. 1603). Simeon was the first of four generations of Dysons to live at Goat House, still standing in Rishworth, near Halifax. Simeon was son of Abraham Dyson (b. 1563).
We’re not yet done with our rearward odyssey through the Dysons, but the dates are less reliable hereafter. Abraham was son of Thomas (born circa 1540), son of Henry (c. 1519), son of Christopher (c. 1488), son of John (c. 1459). This lengthy scroll of generations was lovingly compiled by Freeman’s cousin, Judith (Bracewell) Dyson, and comes mostly from parish records in and around Halifax in the north of England. The mortal remains of most of these Dysons repose in a stretch of ground some dozen miles across centered on the town of Elland in Yorkshire. The earliest Dyson, a woman named Dionysia, was born in the 1250s. She enters the documentary world because she was suspected of horse thievery.
In this book we are naturally interested in Freeman and the pivotal events in his life: meeting the women who became his wives, the births of his children, his not having died in the world war, his scholarship to study physics in America. But we could also say that equally important were the fact that Freeman’s father, George, did not die in the earlier world war, or that George’s scholarships to study music in London and then in Italy and Germany opened up a wider intellectual world, or that George’s mother, Alice, had persevered in getting the boy proper music lessons, enabling his departure from Yorkshire down to the great metropolis to the south, or that George’s blacksmith father, John, was a choirmaster and lover of music.
Notice that in the genealogy above it is all sons and fathers. That’s because by tradition the family name is carried down by sons. Freeman has five daughters and one son. The son, George, has only a daughter himself, so it would seem that the Dyson name, at least the American branch, would peter out. But Freeman’s daughter Rebecca, in agreement with her husband, Peter, decided that their children, including three sons, would retain the Dyson name. When told of this decision over the phone, Freeman said only “marvelous.” The youngest of those grandsons, the youngest of all the Dysons, is named Jack Freeman Dyson. So the Dysons, and even the Freemans, will persist.
The Dyson lineage is short by geologic standards but long as ordinary family histories go. The detail is due to careful church records, supplemented by the organizational efforts of the Halifax Antiquarian Society. All this, Dyson notes, is just part of our growing ability to retain a record of our ancestors: their words through writing, their faces through photography, their gestures through movies, and their voices through recordings. Now we can even map the sequence of the genetic blueprint used to make the cells that constituted our bodies. What’s next? The ability to clone a new individual from DNA information? The ability to reconstruct an individual’s memories and thoughts—in effect to replay that person’s entire experience?36
Dyson has done a pretty good job of preserving a record of his existence—through his scientific publications, his books, and his children and grandchildren. He has cast a wide net and found the universe to be anything but pointless. Meanwhile, he is living as long as he can in order to see what happens.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Freeman Dyson, the man who over the years has submitted to a hundred interviews, did not relish being interviewed for this book. “Maybe in fifty years,” he said, “you’ll be able to tell whether I did anything important.” I couldn’t wait that long. Instead I believed that substantive things could be said about Mr. Dyson right now. Asked whether he would mind if I proceeded with an independent book about him, he gave me his “blessing” (his word) for my project, “especially if it is honestly critical.” I assured him that it would be.
Fortunately, many Dyson family members were forthcoming. Freeman Dyson’s wife Imme, his sister Alice, his son George, h
is daughters Esther, Mia, and Rebecca, his daughter-in-law Ann Yow-Dyson, and his stepdaughter Katarina all kindly provided valuable information and insights. I appreciate their crucial help. Freeman Dyson’s second cousin, Judith Bracewell, who has made quite a study of the Dyson family going back generations, supplied many interesting facts and pictures. Imme Dyson’s cousin Joerg Deibert provided useful photographs. George Dyson was generous with family pictures.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Freeman Dyson’s first wife, Verena Huber-Dyson. Over the course of more than ninety e-mail messages (she did not wish to be visited and didn’t want to speak on the phone) Dr. Huber-Dyson supplied a rich tapestry of events and impressions from her years with Mr. Dyson. Her remarks helped furnish a complex emotional component to the story of Freeman Dyson’s life, which might otherwise have gotten lost amid the bustle of his professional activities. It’s important to point out that Freeman declined to read any of the chapters of my book before publication, and so in the text he will not be seen as refuting or commenting upon Verena’s remarks, many of which are critical.
I was fortunate in being able to interview dozens of Freeman Dyson’s professional colleagues, some of whom are eminent scientists or writers in their own right. The interviews were carried out in a variety of modes—in person, over the phone, by e-mail, or by video/Internet. For supplying information or talking with me, and in many cases reading text from the chapters, I thank the following: Henry Abarbanel, Steven Aftergood, Finn Aserud, Richard Askey, Robert Austin, Kenneth Brower, Predrag Cvitanovic, Cees Dekker, Cecile Morette DeWitt, Sidney Drell, Harold Feiveson, Charles Ferguson, Richard Garwin, Gary Hudson, William Happer, Stephen Hsu, David Kaiser, Paul Koehler, Lawrence Krauss, Georg Kreisel, Joel Lebowitz, Andrew Lenard, Elliott Lieb, Avishai Margalit, Gregg Maryniak, Robert Moore, Richard Muller, Edward Neuenschwander, Theo Nieuwenhuizen, Joseph Pelton, Larry Potts, Martin Rees, Sam Schweber, Roy Schwitters, Martin Sherwin, Lee Silver, Vaclav Smil, Mosur Sundaresan, Scott Tremaine, Lee Valentine, Frank von Hippel, Steven Weinberg, Paul Weingartner, Frank Wilczek, Edward Witten, and Carl Woese.
Discussions with other experts and friends of mine were useful in preparing the book. For this I thank Steven Blau, Keay Davidson, Nancy Forbes, John Gillick, Chris Gorski, Paul Ricer, and Neal Singer.
I received cheerful help from archivists and public-information officials at several organizations. I am grateful to Christine Ferrara, Christine DeBella, and Erica Mosner at the Institute for Advanced Study; Mary Ann Meyer, Pamela Thompson, and Donald Lehr at the Templeton Foundation; Joseph Anderson and Scott Prouty at the Center for the History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics; Constance Chatfield-Taylor and Monica Morgan at the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, Douglas Fouquet at General Dynamics, and Suzanne Foster and Madeleine Copin at Winchester College.
Two people played pivotal roles in producing this book, my literary agent John Thornton and my editor Marcia Markland at the Thomas Dunne Books division of St. Martin’s Press. I also thank Marcia’s assistant Kat Brzozowski. Other St. Martin’s people who made valuable contributions were Michael Cantwell, Fred Chase, and Joan Higgins. The cover was designed by James Iacobelli.
NOTES
The most important source material for this book comes from Freeman Dyson’s own books and from interviews I conducted with his family, friends, and colleagues. Two other books provide an expert, if somewhat technical, context for Dyson’s quantum career: Silvan Schweber’s QED and the Men Who Made It and David Kaiser’s Drawing Theories Apart.
Dyson has been interviewed many times. The most valuable of these for the purpose of writing this book were Schweber’s extensive conversations with Dyson, available on the Internet in video format, and an oral history audio interview of Dyson appearing on the website of the American Institute of Physics. Two other books provide valuable scenes from Dyson’s life but are not themselves full biographies of him: George Dyson’s Project Orion and Kenneth Brower’s The Starship and the Canoe.
The notes that follow use a number of abbreviations to denote key works referenced in this book.
ABBREVIATIONS USED FOR DYSON AND HIS WORKS:
Disturbing: Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
Eros: From Eros to Gaia (London: Penguin, 1992).
FJD: Freeman J. Dyson
Glass: A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007).
Imagined: Imagined Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997; paperback, 1998).
Infinite: Infinite in All Directions (New York: Harper & Row, 1998; paperback, 2004).
Origins: Origins of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; second edition, 1999).
Rebel: The Scientist as Rebel (New York: New York Review Books, 2006).
Selected: Selected Papers and Commentary (Providence: American Mathematical Society, 1996).
Sun: The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; paperback, 2000).
W&H: Weapons and Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
OTHER ABBREVIATIONS:
AIP: American Institute of Physics Oral History, FJD interviewed by Finn Aserud, 17 December 1986, transcript at www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4585.html.
IAS: Institute for Advanced Study
IJ: Imme Jung
Kaiser: David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
NYRB: The New York Review of Books
NYT: The New York Times
Orion: George Dyson, Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).
PFS: Phillip F. Schewe
PT: Physics Today magazine
QED: Silvan S. Schweber, QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
SA: Scientific American
Starship: Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978; paperback edition, Perennial Library, 1983).
VHD: PFS interview with Verena Huber-Dyson
WEB: Silvan S. Schweber online interviews of FJD, “Web of Stories,” 157 segments, http://www.webofstories.com/play/4309.
1. KILLING TIME
1. W&H, p. 109.
2. Ibid., p. 17.
3. Ibid., p. 112.
4. Sun, p. 54.
5. QED, p. 476; also FJD in Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist, John Brockman, ed. (New York: Pantheon, 2004), p. 63.
6. WEB, 7.
7. Ibid., 15.
8. QED, p. 477.
9. Disturbing, p. 34.
10. FJD in Nature’s Imagination, John Cornwell, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 4.
11. WEB, 13.
12. PFS interview with Esther Dyson.
13. WEB, 17.
14. Disturbing, p. 16.
15. WEB, 19.
16. Selected, p. 4.
17. PFS interview with Madeleine Copin, mathematics teacher at Winchester College.
18. “Chamber Annals,” Winchester College, 1938–1940.
19. “The Wykemhamist,” Winchester College, 1938–1941.
20. PFS interview with Suzanne Foster, archivist at Winchester College; the number she supplied for Winchester College war dead is 500, not the 600 cited by Freeman Dyson (W&H, p. 110).
21. Disturbing, p. 17.
22. WEB, 22.
23. FJD, Foreword to Clement Durrell, Readable Relativity (New York: Harper & Row, 1971; originally published, 1926), p. v.
24. G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969; originally published, 1940), p. 185.
25. WEB, 24.
26. Selected, p. 7.
27. Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (New York: Basic, 2009), p. 320.
28. WEB,
35
29. Ibid., 29
30. Ibid., 30.
31. W&H, p. 100.
32. Ibid., p. 98.
33. FJD in Technology Review, November/December 2006.
34. Disturbing, p. 23.
35. FJD, Technology Review.
36. W&H, p. 119.
37. FJD, Technology Review.
38. WEB, 37.
39. QED, p. 489.
40. FJD, Technology Review.
41. W&H, p. 117.
42. Ibid., p. 120.
43. Ibid., p. 61.
44. Ibid., p. 120.
45. FJD interviewed by Wim Kayzer, Glorious Accident, PBS, aired 1994.
2. LIFE IS A BLUR
1. George Dyson, Fiddling While Rome Burns: A Musician’s Apology (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 3.
2. Winchester College: A Register for the Years 1930 to 1975, C. F. Badcock and J. R. La T. Carrie, ed. (Winchester College, 1992).
3. George Dyson, Fiddling While Rome Burns, p. 7.
4. Selected, p. 9.
5. Ibid.
6. Selected, p. 9.
7. David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (New York: Viking, 2011), p. 291.
8. Selected, p. 10.
9. WEB, 47.
10. FJD, talk at the University of Portland, December 3, 2009.
11. Selected, p. 11.
12. QED, p. 493.
13. Ibid., p. 492.
14. Letter from Rudolf Peierls to Hans Bethe, The Bethe-Peierls Correspondence, Sabine Lee, ed. (Singapore: World Scientific, 2007), p. 312.
15. Disturbing, p. 61.
16. VHD.
3. ECUMENICAL COUNCILS
1. WEB, 54.
2. Ibid., 65.
3. QED, p. 495.
4. WEB, 58.
5. Kaiser, p. 68.
6. AIP.
7. WEB, 49.
8. Ibid., 50.
9. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited with an introduction by Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), p. 39.
Maverick Genius Page 36
