On Friday, February 28th of 2020, Visionary Physicist and Mathematician Freeman Dyson
passed away at the age of 96.
For regular viewers of our show, it will come as no surprise that Dyson was one of the greatest,
if not the greatest, inspiration for SFIA.
So it seemed right and proper that we celebrate the man and his work.
While he is best known, especially here, for the Megastructure and Stellar Engine bearing
his name, the Dyson Sphere or Dyson Swarm, a way of potentially allowing our solar system
to support a billion times its current population in comfort, his work both on theory and practical
applications is almost impossible to fully catalogue.
However, for the Dyson Sphere alone he will surely be remembered long ahead in time.
There is more to a man than his work, but I wanted to discuss that work today as we
honor him, and there is a very great deal of it, some of which we’ve looked at more
in other episodes and we’ll mention those as we go if you want to learn more about those
ideas and see why so many of us view him as a legend.
Dyson was born in England in 1923 on December 15, his parents a composer and a social worker.
He won a scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge at age 15 where he studied mathematics, then
he worked in Royal Air Force Operational Research Section during World War 2 improving bombing
techniques, before moving to the United States in 1947.
In the US he made the acquaintance of Richard Feynman.
Feynman and he, amongst others, worked on Quantum Electrodynamics, a burgeoning field.
Feynman, a legend in the field, developed the Feynman Diagrams so vital to understanding
Quantum Electrodynamics.
During this time we get the first achievement named after him, the Dyson Series, which allows
one to sum those Feynman diagrams together.
This all earned him the admiration of Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, who got him
a lifetime appointment to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, for in Oppenheimer’s
words “Proving me Wrong”, even though Dyson had not yet earned a Ph.D., and he never
did get one, his highest award being a bachelor’s degree.
He is usually considered to have been unfortunately left out of a 1965 Nobel Prize awarded to
Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga for that work on Quantum Electrodynamics, due to the
Nobel’s rule of limiting recipients to no more than 3 per award, but never expressed
any regret about that and indeed he wrote up an article in Science in 1965 heaping praise
on the trio, which they certainly deserved.
Already distinguished in the 1950s, he would soon go on to work on various nuclear Projects,
including Project Orion, a nuclear powered spacecraft that runs by detonating atomic
bombs, and perhaps the first plausible design for an interstellar ship, and we looked at
that in our episode “The Nuclear Option”.
A big fan and thinker for interstellar missions, he also was a leader in the efforts for Breakthrough
Starshot, our effort to develop light-sail spacecraft.
He also developed the concept of Dyson’s Eternal Intelligence, as a means for an intelligent
species to escape the heat death of the universe via computational methods.
Although we later learned of the accelerating expansion of the universe, meaning escape
is not possible, his concept still holds value for extending the life of intelligence in
the universe and we’ve discussed this in our Civilizations at the End of Time series.
Indeed his 1979 paper, “Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe”
was one of the strongest influences for that series of videos.
Dyson also originated the idea of a genetically engineered Dyson Tree which would grow inside
a comet, providing a breathable atmosphere within the comet or the tree itself.
Essentially a method of growing a space habitat, rather than constructing one, as we usually
envision for megastructures and habitats.
Using photosynthesis for energy and cometary material for nutrients, it would provide a
self-sustaining habitat for humans and other critters.
For more about this concept, see our episode on Space Whales and Bioships.
He was involved in Biotech and coined the term “Green Technologies” referring to
the use of biological methods and genetic engineering to use solar power to replace
our use of fossil fuels.
Interestingly, Dyson was rather skeptical of climatic models.
While he did believe CO2 contributed to global warming, he felt the field was very complex
and science didn’t yet fully understand the climate and favored biological remedies.
In his book “The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet” he described these technologies
as freeing the world of intellectual and economic isolation.
He also expanded on von Neumann idea of self-replicating machines to explore space by adding biological
and Artificial Intelligence components and coined the term “Astrochicken” for these
cyborg critters.
Eggs would be launched to explore distant planets and grow using local starlight and
materials in order to perform their mission.
Possibly closer to what we envision von Neumann probes as today than what von Neumann himself
had in mind in 1948.
We will probably get around to doing an episode on that at some point, as it is one of my
favorites by him.
He also contributed to game theory, particularly the well-known thought problem of the Prisoner’s
Dilemma, and I always found it a touch ironic that our season 1, episode 1 video, on the
Dyson Dilemma of the Fermi Paradox tends to get confused in web searches with his work
on the topic.
The Dyson Dilemma is the name I gave for a problem with the Fermi Paradox, of wondering
where all the ancient civilizations in the Universe are, for not why we don’t see them,
but why we see any stars in the night sky at all, as we’d expect old and vast interstellar
civilizations to englobe every star they settled inside a Dyson Sphere, rendering them invisible
to the human eye.
So many concepts are named for him beyond just the Dyson Sphere and Dyson Tree.
In terms of math, we have Dyson numbers, also known as parasitic numbers, the Dyson Series,
the Dyson Conjecture, Dyson’s Transform, the Schwinger–Dyson equation, and the Thue–Siegel–Dyson–Roth
theorem.
For every one that is named for him, there are far more too.
He also had a fair amount to say on philosophy and theology in regard to science.
One of my favorites being his notion that philosophers tend to fall broadly into two
camps, lumpers and splitters, those who tend to take the Platonic notion of the Universe
being composed of ideas versus those who tend to split and divide the Universe into atoms
and other basic building blocks.
He observed that this tended to apply to almost every field of study, this coming from a comment
by Charles Darwin about hair-splitters and lumpers in regard to animal classification.
Some folks would divide categories into new ones over any minor hair-splitting difference
while others lumped anything even vaguely similar into one broad category.
We see this a lot in astronomy too, in regards to classifying stars, planets, moons, and
other celestial objects.
Dyson contributed many more concepts and theories in many fields over his long, productive life
and I would encourage our audience to further research his contributions during a life well-lived.
As to the man himself, he continued his work until the day he died, and his daughter Mia
Dyson says it was on a visit to his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies that
he suffered the fall he died from a couple days later.
Mia, a pastor and nurse in Maine and one of his six children, said of him:
"You could tell that the world was a beautiful place through his eyes, and somehow understanding
all the formulas and the natural laws and all the mysteries he had plumbed through the
study of physics, that it only grew more and more beautiful, the more he understood."
While described by his peers as contrarian, unorthodox, shy, and humble, he was almost
universally well-liked inside his field.
In the many many hours of interviews I've watched, of the Giants of 20th century physics
talking about each other and the experience of working with each other, I have never heard
anyone say a negative word about Dyson, only that he was kind, patient, humble and very
brilliant, and also very much the absent-minded Professor type, always lost in his Grand thoughts
about the universe and the amazing things we could build in it.
For my own work, as I said, he was one of my greatest inspirations and I’ll always
regret having never gotten to meet the man, not just for his brilliance, but because of
the deep optimism for the future and his ability and willingness to peer very far ahead in
time, not content just to contemplate those technologies of the near future.
He will be missed, but he will be remembered even into the distant future by those living
in the many worlds he was the architect of.