Freeman Dyson’s death is a little like the death of the last member of a rare species, only he didn’t even belong to a species, he was a one-off individual, he was singular. The point is, the world is a less interesting place now. I wrote two posts about him; one was about his astonishingly…
The last time I saw Dyson, maybe six months ago, I wondered whether he might be slowing down a little; on the other hand it was a Friday night at dinnertime, when all natural creatures slow down a little. This post first appeared October 7, 2013; it’s been updated here and there. I do seem…
I do seem to keep referring to Freeman Dyson, even writing whole posts about him. The reason, I think, is that I want to write a profile of him, even though 1) profiles of him have been done and done and done, the most recent being a full-blown biography; and 2) he’s way above my…
What an odd-looking person this Freeman Dyson is. His nose is long, his ears stick out, his smile is tentatively friendly, but what to make of those eyes? Dyson is hard to describe: he’s not like anyone you’ve met before and whatever he says is not what you’ll expect him to say. He’s spent his…
The world of science entered November 6, 1919, as gray as a doughboy and exited it dancing like a flapper. That afternoon, British Astronomer Royal Sir Frank Dyson announced at a special meeting of the Royal Society in London that a recent experiment had validated a new theory of relativity. The occasion provided one of…
Some smart cookie timed the release of the movie about Robert Oppenheimer to the week of the anniversary of Trinity, the first test of the first nuclear weapon. (Another smart cookie threw in the release of a Barbie movie and a notable Barbenheimer genre was born, but that’s not what this post is about right…
This first ran on Sept. 6, 2012. My nephew was then a biology graduate student; he is now a fully-functioning scientist. He is confident, self-collected, easy to talk to, curious — in short, he made it through his education in one piece. But the education itself has not changed — not the advice, not the…
Are we making tactical nuclear weapons again? Tactical meaning “not strategic,” that is, not ones that take out cities and countries, just little ones that take out city blocks? So that we can get the jump on the the Russians before they can get the jump on us? Thereby invoking what the late, great Sid…