Freeman Dyson (#301)

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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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