I had this skill with mathematical tools, and I played these tools as well as I could
just because it was beautiful.
Rather in the same way a musician plays a violin: Not expecting to change the world,
but just because he loves the instrument.
My name is Freeman Dyson, and I'm a professor retired at the Institute for Advanced Study
in Princeton.
When I was a young kid, I used to scribble big numbers and draw pictures of the solar
system, so obviously I was interested right from the start.
I think the decisive moment in my career path was reading the book "Men of Mathematics"
by Eric Temple Bell.
He showed the mathematicians as being mostly crooks and people of very mixed kind of qualities.
Not at all saints.
Many of them quite unscrupulous and not very clever.
And still they managed to do great mathematics.
So it told a kid: If they can can do it, why can't you?
And that was certainly what turned me on.
I came from England to the United States to study physics.
I applied to Cornell University to work with Hans Bethe who was a famous physicist.
But the amazing thing was that in the very first week I was there, I met Dick Feynman,
who is an absolute genius.
And of course I never even heard of him.
He was not so famous in those days.
But I immediately realized this was the guy, and he was such a tremendous — just
sparkling character.
A clown, and always telling stories and in addition to that very brilliant.
So I attached myself to Feynman as quickly as I could.
He was working on these problems of quantum electrodynamics, and he had done a great deal
which was very beautiful, but which nobody else understood.
And he loved to talk, and I loved to listen.
So within six months I had pretty well mastered his language.
And within one year, I actually was able to improve on it.
I translated his ideas into mathematics so it became more accessible to the world.
And as a result I became famous, but it all happened within about six months.
I was very much interested in space travel.
The next exciting thing I did, actually, was to work with a company in California called
General Atomic, which still exists.
I worked for the company for a couple of years building a space ship.
And so we decided that we would go around the solar system with a space ship driven
by nuclear bombs.
So we would launch the ship into space and bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb going up about four
bombs per second going up all the way to Mars and then afterwards to Jupiter and Saturn.
And we intended to go ourselves.
We had actual model space ships about so big, about a meter in diameter or so, with chemical
explosives that actually went bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb a few times, a few hundred feet up.
So that lasted for two years.
By that time it was clear that the competition was actually going to win.
The competition being Werner von Braun and the Apollo program, which was going to go
with ordinary rockets to the moon.
I think the notion that I like to oppose the consensus in science is totally wrong.
There's only one subject that I've been controversial, which is climate.
I'm not really a climate expert, but I have strong opinions, and the most strong and firmly-based
of my opinions is that this is really still a mysterious subject and that climate is not
at all well-understood.
I'm not saying that the majority is necessarily wrong.
I'm saying that they don't understand what they're seeing.
It will take a lot of very hard work before that question is settled.
People are often asking me what's going to happen next in science that's important.
Of course the whole point is that if it's important, it's something we didn't expect.
In order for science to go on, it has to have mysteries.
That's the way it has been up till now, so I hope very much it continues.