Freeman Dyson (#301)

Please support the podcast by taking our short listener survey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/intotheimpossible For that last four
years of his life, Freeman Dyson would spend winters in La Jolla,
and work alongside physicists at UC San Diego (as well as the
super-secret scientific advisory group known as the JASONS). This
video was from my last conversation with Freeman at UC San Diego in
2018. Freeman Dyson was Professor emeritus at the Institute for
Advanced Study. Mathematician, physicist, philosopher and
iconoclast Freeman Dyson was one of the most influential,
far-reaching and unconstrained minds of our age. His explorations
-- ranging from fusion power to star-encapsulating energy
collectors called 'Dyson Spheres' -- stimulated thinkers around the
globe. Boldly speculating ahead trillions of years, Dyson has been
called the top theologian of the 20th century. Always unabashed, he
has raised controversy from all ends of the political spectrum with
unusual ideas about climate change. Dyson came to Cornell
University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe
and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the
behavior of atoms and radiation. Though he never formally received
his PhD, Dyson's work was incredibly influential and diverse. He
worked on fields ranging from nuclear reactors, to solid-state
physics, to ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for
situations where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.
Dyson’s books include Disturbing the Universe, Origins of Life, The
Scientist as Rebel, and most recently. Dyson was a fellow of the
American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of
Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000, he
was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Topics
include Freeman's final book, Maker of Patterns: A Life in
Letters:: https://amzn.to/3auNIbG , science and religion, and the
Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In 2019 Freeman
and Greg Benford (UCSD PhD 1967) had a conversation, moderated by
me and hosted at UCSD about the deep future of humanity. Find that
video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riPDQ3VJBCI Lastly,
please see here for a nice retrospective on Freeman by San Diego
Union-Tribune reporter, Gary Robbins:
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/science/story/2020-02-28/remembering-famed-physicist-freeman-dyson-and-his-la-jolla-years
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