16 ms·

Freeman Dyson Has Died

1238 points by ChickeNES 7y ago

adventured 7y ago
For anyone else that couldn't access it: https://outline.com/Aw9mRN https://outline.com/Aw9mRN http://archive.is/oqumk http://archive.is/oqumk
rtrunck 7y ago
“It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons.” ― Freeman Dyson
- altonzheng 7y ago
  What a beautiful quote, thank you for sharing.
- jschwartzi 7y ago
  This makes me think of how the story in The Expanse is proceeding.
- mongol 7y ago
  Sounds like Dyson believed in, or hoped for, free will, in that mind would affect the randomness that quantum physics involves. I think it would be great if it was so because the alternative would be that we are just machines. But I fear that the mind does not have that type of influence on it's fundamental parts...
  - alexpetralia 7y ago
    Though I could be wrong, I believe his point was that consciousness - the mind - is the randomness underlying quantum physics.
  - jackcosgrove 7y ago
    If the brain cannot consciously reprogram itself, why does studying work?
- josephpmay 7y ago
  That quote is mindblowing. I don't think I've ever heard an argument for free will on a sub-atomic level. It never crossed my mind that that was a position someone could conceivably hold. But it's weirdly comforting- it almost feels religious- and I'm now thinking about how that would affect emergence.
  - samatman 7y ago
    Conway (yep, that Conway) and Kochen elaborate on this in the Strong Free Will Theorem: https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf
    - Causality1 7y ago
      Isn't that a fundamental misunderstanding of the definition of "observer" in quantum physics? To "observe" is to cause a quantum system to interact in such a way that collapses probabilities. Whether there is a living observer is totally irrelevant.
      - jes5199 7y ago
        if I remember correctly, this paper specifically tries to prove that those are the same
      - v77 7y ago
        I would say this is considered an open question.
        hprotagonist 7y ago
        it is “the measurement problem”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem
        scotty79 7y ago
        Only for non-physicists and physicists wondering about things outside of physics.
- Florin_Andrei 7y ago
  Related: http://nautil.us/issue/82/panpsychism/is-matter-conscious-rp http://nautil.us/issue/82/panpsychism/is-matter-conscious-rp
  - jkeat 7y ago
    Here's another article that introduces the idea of panpsychism: https://aeon.co/ideas/panpsychism-is-crazy-but-its-also-most-probably-true https://aeon.co/ideas/panpsychism-is-crazy-but-its-also-most...
- henriquemaia 7y ago
  Lucretius, some 2000 years ago, based on a completely different kind of atomism, believed something very similar. Free will was due to random events on the atomic level, what he called clinamen (the swerve).
  - analognoise 7y ago
    "The Swerve" is a great name for my punk band.
- bagacrap 7y ago
  I thought the observer effect of particle physics fell out of favor. This author gives a pretty persuasive argument that, at least from a theoretical physics point of view, consciousness does not create the universe. https://www.paulanlee.com/2017/04/14/consciousness-and-the-misunderstood-observer-effect/ https://www.paulanlee.com/2017/04/14/consciousness-and-the-m...
  - meowface 7y ago
    It has, at least if you mean the hypothesis that the wave function is collapsed by consciousness. This doesn't rule out theories of panpsychism and panprotopsychism (or even rule those theories in?), but I don't find the arguments in favor of them convincing. I think it's plausible, but I'm skeptical. I'm also skeptical that quantum mechanics plays an important role in consciousness (beyond the role it plays in the rest of biology, and everything else in the universe), though I think that's more plausible. Dyson was a brilliant person, but I disagree with his quote there. I think we may develop a deep theory of consciousness (including solving "the hard problem") within the next century which will put some of these debates to rest.
jaredhansen 7y ago
I think it would be appropriate to break out the black bar for this one. For those not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
- s_dev 7y ago
  No black bar for Dyson. The black bars overwhelmingly go to the titans of (digital) tech rather than titans of science.
vtomole 7y ago
I love his "Web of Stories": https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/1 https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/1. Rest in peace.
- OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
  Yes, definitely marvelous. Also a Youtube Playlist. I'll put it on, go for a walk, and the time just disappears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs1jGsn61p8&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzDA6mtmKQEgWfcIu49J4nN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs1jGsn61p8&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...
astrophysician 7y ago
About 4 years ago, I was a grad student in astrophysics at Princeton. Dyson worked at the Institute for Advanced Study which, while not officially part of the university was essentially an extension of the various departments (shared colloquiums, any researcher there was a valid thesis adviser, etc.). The grad students have a tradition (or used to) called “Thunch” (Thursday Lunch) where they invite someone to come have lunch and hang out every week. It was by far one of the highlights of my life — maybe 10 people in the room max, eating pizza, shooting shit with some of the most impressive and accomplished people you could hope to meet — Nobel prize laureates, Neil deGrasse Tyson, famous authors, whoever would respond to our invitation (people tended to say yes). Dyson was one of them. At the time he was already like 92 years old, dressed in a suit, occasionally using a handkerchief, and this guy had just published a result in Nature. The guy was SHARP at 92. Nicest, most interesting person I have ever met. Knew Einstein from his early days at IAS. Worked on an early version of the space program that looked into launching people into space with large spring loaded contraptions that were to be propelled with nuclear weapons. Those were the days I guess... So sorry to see he’s gone, the guy was a living legend.
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago
  He led the Orion project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls... Dyson interview from 2016 on space colonies https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/home-on-lagrange/transcript/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/home-on-lagrange/tran...
- dmead 7y ago
  so what you're saying is that we have nuclear trebuchets?
- gbronner 7y ago
  I've met him and his other daughter. They are/were wonderful people. There were a lot of "solutions" using nuclear weapons looking for a problem. There was a proposal to blow a new canal through nicaragua, to blast harbors into Alaska, etc. My roommate's father showed me his paper that anticipated fracking: drill a deep well in oil shale, through a small nuclear weapon in the bottom, blow it up and watch as the pressure and heat extract the oil and have it flow through the fractured rock back to your oil well. He almost got to test it.
starpilot 7y ago
He was the sanest mind on climate change: https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_climate_establishment https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_cl...
- nerpderp82 7y ago
  > Dyson contends that since carbon dioxide is good for plants, a warmer planet could be a very good thing. And if CO2 does get to be a problem, Dyson believes we can just do some genetic engineering to create a new species of super-tree that can suck up the excess. Forever the optimist!
  - 2ion 7y ago
    He put too much trust into mankind. I think it's a problem really good people have almost always; they underestimate how original they are.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    That is actually work-in-process. Biological engineers are trying to upgrade C3 plants to C4, improve rubisco efficiency, and other such performance enhancers for photosynthesis. It's not so much driven by climate changes as by potential agricultural profits, though. If it were the former, they'd make an algae 2.0 and drop it in the ocean. But as C3 to C4 modification could make a hotter, drier rice with 20%-50% higher yield, that's worth a whole lot of money. Of course, that work has been underway for decades--even before CRISPR/Cas9--and golden rice got stomped for no good reason, so even if someone made a super-Sitka-pine exclusively for carbon fixation, it could still get blocked by politics.
cpach 7y ago
RIP. Here’s an article: https://www.mainepublic.org/post/renowned-mathematician-and-physicist-freeman-dyson-has-died-age-96 https://www.mainepublic.org/post/renowned-mathematician-and-...
ssivark 7y ago
A free and original thinker, who wrote well. An intellectual powerhouse with immense humility. He will be sorely missed. Here are some of his most interesting tidbits (For a man like Dyson, I'm sure there's more) 1. Birds and frogs: https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf (On two kinds of intellectual personalities) 2. The Scientist as a Rebel (essay collection): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51431.The_Scientist_as_Rebel https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51431.The_Scientist_as_R... 3. He has been thoughtfully articulate in his perspective on religion. While I can't find an appropriate link right away, definitely worth checking out. Quotes/Excerpts: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
lzybkr 7y ago
I guess it's time to reread Starship and the Canoe - a great book about Freeman's nuclear weapon powered spaceship and his son George's interest in building boats. I thoroughly enjoyed it 25+ years ago.
sunstone 7y ago
One for the ages.
s_dev 7y ago
He was interesting character partially because he believed in God. This is actually quite rare at the very upper echelons of the scientific community.
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson#Science_and_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson#Science_and_reli... Seems more complicated than that > I am a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian. To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension
  - s_dev 7y ago
    >To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension Doesn't sound very falsifiable.
  - tazedsoul 7y ago
    I truly appreciate thinkers who are able to think about God in their own original terms. His particular description of the notion of God is quite similar to my own, so this is quite nice to read.
- ellis0n 7y ago
  Born from the light and came back to the light I think that everything is the light with different levels form of concentration. High concentration of the light transforms to physics matter. Low level of the light is vacuum, high is atomic energy, Large Hadron Collider for example. The light is universal transmitter & transformer. The light is concentrated knowledge that is transmitted from the sun to every particle of the planet and peoples, and thanks to the light, matter and a variety of life forms are created, which creates a variety of forms of matter. The idea of Christianity about the resurrection of people is magnificent, then such great people as Dyson could be resurrected, why not? But technologies are needed in new physics and medicine, which would gain access to reality at the nanoparticle level. A 3D printer that prints the light and lays knowledge into the light to recreate a person. There is a pattern that the more we get access at the micro level, the more powerful chips we can build, and more powerful chips can calculate more hashes and allow us to bring in new gigantic machines, like telescopes and spaceships, which will give access to new macro-knowledge such as dark matter and black holes of matter-time consensus, which will allow us to create new petabyte flash drives based on light, and new the light based computers will be able to burn information directly to the points of space, and what it means to materialize any object, which will provide access to new knowledge and made new grand chips & telescopes. We already partially use the light in our rooms, networks and cameras and monitors to exchange information. New theories and machines based on the light will allow creating new machines for controlling the space-time continent and copying knowledge from any space-time, and then the task of resurrecting people becomes feasible and we can transfer the consciousness of this particular person from the past without distortion. If this happens in the next 5,000 years, then Dyson saw it right. To create such machines, we need new geniuses with Dyson's light. I'm sure we are know less about physics & light, because we live on single planet in single point of universe and our theories can be expanded when we arrive to new points of universe.
hirundo 7y ago
"When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories" "We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods." "...the computer models are very good at solving equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly." https://www.azquotes.com/author/4275-Freeman_Dyson/tag/climate-change https://www.azquotes.com/author/4275-Freeman_Dyson/tag/clima...
- b0sk 7y ago
  the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia resulting in bushfires, famine and drought... seas taking over the cities are all demonstrable effects of climate change. Did he live in UK? Yea the winter was milder I guess.
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    His point is, for every place that gets worse, someplace else will get better. Small consolation if you live in one of the former places, of course. But he's not wrong. Earth as a whole is a bit colder than it would be in the best of all possible universes. Other effects like ocean acidification are harder to hand-wave away. I hate cold weather, myself, but it's not just about terrestrial climate.
    - Daishiman 7y ago
      His point has been debunked time and time again. "Better" is a definition for the organisms that may inhabit a certain environment. Under no reasonable time frame for human existence is his claim even close to valid.
      - CamperBob2 7y ago
ISL 7y ago
Here's a vote for an HN black bar. Dyson's work was incredible.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jeswin 7y ago
  I think prevailing opinion here is that it should be left to the admins. The black bar is not a measure of the notability of someone's contributions, but rather is about their connection or impact to YC/HN (and the HN community). Personally I agree with that. The newspapers will have great obituaries anyway.
kkwteh 7y ago
I particularly enjoyed being immersed in the ethos of engineering, which is very different from the ethos of science. A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering. Dyson said this while describing his time working on the Orion project. It had a profound effect on me and it has always stuck with me.
sadfev 7y ago
No! He was a hero to any aspiring physicist. I can’t even begin to list his accomplishments!
Freestyler_3 7y ago
I think last week someone mentioned the dyson sphere with a link to wiki. It said he regretted they named it after him.
- mcrider 7y ago
  Huh, I'd be curious to see that source. I know he somewhat recanted the idea of a Dyson sphere, as it is completely impractical even with unimagined technology (re: tensile strength of the materials, and preventing such a megastructure from falling into the sun whenever a rock hits it). But he later proposed the idea of a Dyson swarm, an extremely large array of solar-sucking satellites orbiting the sun as an idea that's theoretically possible even with today's technology.
  - theothermkn 7y ago
    One thing that's slightly interesting about Dyson Sphere's is that spherical shells of matter exert exactly no gravitational pull at any point in their interiors. That is, the integral of gravitational pull over the whole shell is identically 0 for every point inside the shell.* This goes for any force that falls off by the inverse square rule, e.g. the electrostatic force. In short, there's no practical way to stick an atmosphere, much less a civilization composed of life forms that depend on gravity, to the inside of the sphere, even if the other engineering challenges could be overcome. * One thing that's suddenly more interesting to me now is if the space at any point is being "pulled" equally in all directions, resulting in zero force, or if the bends in space-time cancel out. In the limit, for example, could you "tear" space-time inside a dense enough and/or heavy enough shell of matter?
    - papreclip 7y ago
      think about the 2d equivalent - a ball rolls down a hill because the potential gradient directs it that way. a ball sitting on a flat pedestal isn't being pulled in every horizontal direction at once by some forces that are proportional to the height of the pedestal. it's not being pulled horizontally at all there is zero space-time curvature within the sphere, it's "flat", so there's no force. nothing is "cancelled out", force is the derivative of energy with respect to space. it's like a 3d pedestal (or rather, a cylinder excavated from the earth with a flat bottom)
gwern 7y ago
Noted physicist slain by oldest foe, gravity: "Mia Dyson says her father, at the age of 96 still regularly went to his office at Princeton University. On Wednesday, on such a visit, she says he suffered a fall and died of his injuries Friday morning." TBIs and elder falling are a terrifying source of morbidity and mortality. So many old people start their terminal decline when they fall, for no particularly good reason. (Even when it doesn't immediately kill them, it can contribute to a downward spiral of ill health, less activity, and iatrogenics.) Who knows how much longer Dyson could have lived if his foot hadn't slipped?
- dmix 7y ago
  What an interesting perspective to consider and a statement on human fragility, especially in the context of such a great man.
  - gwern 7y ago
    Unfortunately, no matter how great you are, you are still a few pounds of grayish peanut butter in a calcium jar.
- tartoran 7y ago
  Or to look at it from a different angle, their fall is caused by their old age decline which in turn triggers their terminal decline. I've seen it throughout my family, once confined to bed at old age one's decline accelerates quickly. It's perhaps that the lack of movement that has some spiraling effect on their health. More and more people should not stop doing sports when they get older, they should do sports less vigorously as they age but movement regime should stay.
  - tzs 7y ago
    I wonder how much of this depends on how big a change there is in movement? Would a lifelong couch potato for whom their post fall movement is only a few percent less than what it was before the fall be less affected than someone who had been very active before their fall and had to cut their movement by 95%?
melling 7y ago
Started writing "later” in life: “Life begins at 55, the age at which I published my first book,” he wrote in “From Eros to Gaia,” Never got his PhD. Taught physics at Cornell. Thoughts on climate change: "Relishing the role of iconoclast, he confounded the scientific establishment by dismissing the consensus about the perils of man-made climate change as “tribal group-thinking.” He doubted the veracity of the climate models, and he exasperated experts with sanguine predictions they found rooted less in science than in wishfulness: Excess carbon in the air is good for plants, and global warming might forestall another ice age." Lots worth reading in the NYT obituary.
- m0zg 7y ago
  >> Excess carbon in the air is good for plants, and global warming might forestall another ice age. How is it not "rooted in science" that excess carbon is good for plants? We're already seeing significant global greening, and yields are up. Excess CO2 also reduces the amount of water the plants need.
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    He's gone, so this isn't really the place for this discussion at all. However, I'm glad this is mentioned and how it shows that there are a lot of intelligent people who have concerns with the current science debate. Consensus isn't science, it's politics, and challenging ones ideas is how we both reinforce the truth as well as dispel myths.
    - naiveprogrammer 7y ago
      Amen
    - m0zg 7y ago
      It's just annoying that some snooty reporter is trying to shit on this great man's legacy by speaking of things they do not understand.
    - aeorgnoieang 7y ago
injb 7y ago
What a loss. There's a fantastic and epic interview with him on youtube here[1]. He tells stories of famous people he knew, meeting Wittgenstein, arguing with Teller, going on a road trip across the country with Feynman etc. Solid gold stuff. I've heard occasional attacks on him over the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg. But I think this is worth a read[2]. He speaks very frankly about what they did and his involvement. It's clear how he felt about it, but he never tries to make excuses for himself. That impressed me about his character in a way that's hard to explain. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzDA6mtmKQEgWfcIu49J4nN https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzDA6mtmKQE... [2] http://www.bible-researcher.com/dresden/dyson.html http://www.bible-researcher.com/dresden/dyson.html
lordleft 7y ago
Rest in Peace. And amazing example of academic and intellectual success sans-phd.
dang 7y ago
Url changed from https://twitter.com/gbrumfiel/status/1233434046266531840 https://twitter.com/gbrumfiel/status/1233434046266531840 to a more substantive article (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22444492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22444492).
dannylandau 7y ago
Worth watching, Freemon Dyson life stories -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs1jGsn61p8&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzDA6mtmKQEgWfcIu49J4nN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs1jGsn61p8&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...
jolesf 7y ago
Infinite in All Directions is still one of my favorite science books. "Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many common features. They share these features also with other enterprises such as art, literature, and music. The most salient features of all these enterprises are discipline and diversity. Discipline to submerge the individual fantasy in a greater whole. Diversity to give scope to the infinite variety of human souls and temperaments. Without discipline there can be no greatness. Without diversity there can be no freedom. Greatness for the enterprise, freedom for the individual- these are the two themes, contrasting but not incompatible, that make up the history of science and the history of religion."
- gigama 7y ago
  "Infinite In All Directions" is right here in my current reading stack next to Loren Eiseley's "All The Strange Hours"... they live on through their written words and all the lives they touched.
adpirz 7y ago
I really feel like it's worth having this discussion: the black bar for Freeman Dyson, but not for Katherine Johnson who died earlier this week. At the time I thought it was likely because she wasn't _directly_ involved in computing and tried to write it off, but Freeman seems to be as related to the page as her. I bring it up because it really does speak to how a community decides who they want to include or not. Unless I've missed some specific guidelines, it sends unwelcoming signals to me.
- krapp 7y ago
  The community doesn't decide who gets the black bar or not, and there are no published guidelines. AFAIK it's entirely the personal preference of the admins, or possibly just dang. Maybe Katherine Johnson just wasn't considered notable enough, or maybe the story just wasn't noticed. I wouldn't necessarily attribute it to sexism, though - there have been male obits that haven't gotten the black bar either.
  - BoorishBears 7y ago
    The story was noticed, it was one of the top stories of the day and had similar comments https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F09rtt53,%2Fm%2F030xd https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F09r... I know, I know, the mostly white people that make up classic HN don't really care about someone who's important to black people. Sure there was a Best Picture nominated movie in large part about her story along with some of the people she worked with but you know not the HN's cup of tea not being about someone who lectured at Stanford or something. But alas... I know I know, classic HN is going to take great exception to me insinuating they are anything less than the most racially aware people with "a ton of black friends" and “they don’t see color” (maybe even one of the few other black guys here will show up and represent them) and this comment will be buried.
- the5dysfunction 7y ago
  I imagine the distinction is that one was a human calculator, and the other was a unique and brilliant mind. I don't see how their gender and/or race has anything to do with it. My guess is if you're looking for sexism and 'unwelcoming signals' you're going to find them everywhere.
jpmattia 7y ago
For fans of Physics Today, they have put up a link to articles authored by Dyson over the years: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/action/doSearch?AllField=freeman+and+dyson&startPage&ContribAuthorStored=Dyson%2C+Freeman+J https://physicstoday.scitation.org/action/doSearch?AllField=...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Rebelgecko 7y ago
The obit refers to him as "Dr. Dyson". Did he ever get a doctorate? edit: I'll leave this up for posterity, but the answer is no. The article explains the discrepancy.
- Iwan-Zotow 7y ago
  "Freeman Dyson, renowned physicist and educator, today (May 17) received an honorary doctor of science degree at Clarkson University"
dr_dshiv 7y ago
A few years ago, I asked Freeman Dyson what we should teach our children so there would be more Freeman Dyson's. He gave a surprising answer. He said we should teach children to genetically "play" with plants. He thought we needed that kind of creativity as a human species if we would ever be able to populate the asteroid belt. He said that most of the surface area of the solar system is in the asteroid belt -- but the only way we could really live out there was if we could create warm blooded plants.
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  Isn't the large total surface area of the asteroid belt overwhelmed by drawbacks like unusability of most of it for most purposes (uneven, unstable, unshielded, etc.), and the fact that humans do really poorly in microgravity?
  - aeorgnoieang 7y ago
    Those drawbacks are only true on some (possible) timescales. The biggest drawback currently, for human settlement of the asteroid belt, is that we can't afford to send anyone there! Freeman Dyson's the person after which the Dyson sphere is named, so the current (relative) "unusability" of asteroids or the fact that humans currently seem to "do really poorly in microgravity" are 'just' additional obstacles to be overcome sometime in the future from the perspective in which space megastructures are possible.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    One question I really hope we can answer someday: exactly how little gravity do humans need before it becomes too "micro"? Can humans stay healthy on Mars? On the Moon? On Ceres or Enceladus or Pluto or Charon or yet smaller bodies? But yeah, I don't think "surface area" is the right angle to look at. More like "volume within a sufficient depth". A lot of (most?) asteroids and comets consist primarily of water ice, and water happens to be pretty darn good at radioactive shielding, so if we build habitats inside the asteroids we'd have a solid chance of significantly addressing that particular hazard (and also have plenty of water for drinking / agriculture / fuel).
  - 7y ago
jonjacky 7y ago
A book called something like 'Quantum Mysteries for Bluffers' described his work on QED this way: Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga independently discovered quantum electrodynamics. Then Freeman Dyson explained it -- to the first three!
dorchadas 7y ago
While at undergraduate studying physics, I once emailed Dyson asking about something he had written with regards to NASA, and what he thought the future of space travel was. I always remember he took the time to respond and email me back. Was really nice, especially as he gets no telling how many emails a day, and easily could've ignored it.
jes5199 7y ago
My favorite thing about Dyson was that, in the middle of doing atomic research, he plotted a graph of the total number of nuclear tests done every year, and saw that it was increasing exponentially - which caused him to reverse his position on the use of nuclear devices, and argue to cancel his own project and all similar projects. from Dyson's 1962 memo on the Test Ban Treaty: "The choice, whether or not to accept a test-ban agreement, is thus not a choice between two static situations, one without testing and the other with testing at some constant rate. This choice seems rather to be, either to stop tests, or to continue to double the rate of testing every three years ad infinitum."
pictur 7y ago
So?
bhickey 7y ago
Between ten and fifteen years ago I was at a colloquium featuring Leon Cooper, Craig Venter and Freeman Dyson (via video). At one point in the conversation, Dyson slumped over only to rouse a few minutes later. He rejoined the conversation without missing a beat.
wiggles_md 7y ago
Why does Freeman Dyson earn a black bar, and Katherine Johnson not?
- sykick 7y ago
  My interpretation of your question is that underlying it is a belief that Katherine Johnson ought to have gotten a black bar given that Freeman Dyson got one. Can you elaborate on why you think they both ought to have gotten or neither of them should have gotten one? Would you have asked why Freeman Dyson did not get a black bar if the roles had been reversed?
- arionhardison 7y ago
  I believe it is rude to ask this question, mainly because you already know the answer and there is no value to be derived from the discussion; therefore it is best to simply allow people to focus on Dyson. A great scientist has died and people should be able to reflect and pay their respect to the life that he lived. It is not fair to ask people to feel the way you feel and the black bar denotes a feeling of mourning. My friends and I had a math games night to honor Katherine Johnson and it was amazing but we would never ask those of another culture to feel the same way or have the same connection with her that we did.
- oska 7y ago
  I think the answer to this is that it is their site and their honour to bestow.
irthomasthomas 7y ago
"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York."
- jdm2212 7y ago
  This appears to be untrue: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/32538/was-hay-invented-only-in-the-middle-ages-in-europe https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/32538/was-hay-in...
skilled 7y ago
Why does HN assume I have a Times subscription?
mhh__ 7y ago
With the exception of his views on climate change, he was probably my favourite living physicist. 94 years is an extremely good (I realise this now that I have a single grandparent left, one down before I was born) innings, but what a shame.
alpb 7y ago
It would be great if the moderators could change the link to a non-paywalled link.
fermenflo 7y ago
Damn, I'm doing research involving partitions right now. I used crank/rank all the time -invariants that he introduced years ago. What a shame, RIP
morphle 7y ago
Freeman Dyson exposed and explained Richard Feynmans genius to the world, but he had better blue thoughts (see my other links in this discussion) than Feynman had ("Plenty Of Room At The Bottom"), on a par with Alan Kay's blue thoughts. He imagined the Dyson Sphere that set me on my path to Science, Carl Sagan just gave the last push. He imagined the space chicken and the Kuiper belt/Oort cloud plants. His carbon cycle ideas have still not been researched seriously. His essay on the origens of life (started by Gödel) are still ringing in my brain. His view of big Napoleon versus small tabletop science is a very valid analysis of our current crises in science and his solution is to be kind to the mad scientists and heretics. By far his best interview is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBjVHLBEsHI&list=PLzLGaX_JvmJoIGJFR_1M088pMz68qUtnc&index=6&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBjVHLBEsHI&list=PLzLGaX_Jvm.... It is also on bittorrent and Peertube. The rest of the Glorious Accident series is worth it as well, especially the group discussion at the end.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- irthomasthomas 7y ago
  Blue thoughts?
ck2 7y ago
May seem trivial but the Dyson Sphere was the most amazing thing I ever learned about though Star Trek, awe inspiring in that it really is theoretically possible for us to build in thousands of years.
tazedsoul 7y ago
Bittersweet news -- but he lived a productive and long life. I came upon parasitic numbers by researching Freeman Dyson one day. Very cool. Read up on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_number
hermitcrab 7y ago
His paper "Time without end : Physics and biology in an open universe" is worth a read: http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ay1/RevModPhys.51.447.pdf http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ay1/RevModPhys.51.447.pdf
DesiLurker 7y ago
He should be buried in a spherical grave! then he would always be in his dyson sphere. RIP!!
amha 7y ago
I heard him speak in 2004, when I was 17. Here's what I wrote in my LiveJournal at the time: On Thursday, I saw Freeman Dyson speak at Cornell. He was so amazing I can't even describe it. I didn’t look at my watch once during the speech. Not long into the talk, the elderly gentleman next to me pulled a scrap of paper out of his pocket and began scribbling notes. He kept writing until the end of the speech. I glanced behind me during the question-and-answer period, and noticed that Schwartz Auditorium was so full that people were standing in the balcony and sitting on the railings just to hear Dyson. The text of Dyson’s speech would have impressed any English teacher. He structured it as seven short stories, with each one slowly building on each other. The style of his writing––the way he chose his words and structured his sentences––would have been impressive if he had been giving a lecture in the humanities, much less a field stereotyped for less-able communicators. The way Dyson was able to convey the sheer wonder of science was an orgasmic experience equivalent to reading my first Carl Sagan book. An 80-year-old physicist who had the energy of a young assistant professor, who delivered his speech fluidly and responded deftly to the audience’s questions––a scientist proficient in more than one science, and fluent enough in biology to give an entire lecture on biotechnology!!!! Oh wow...
matheist 7y ago
A couple of years ago I got interested in an old paper of his, "Continuous Functions Defined on Spheres", where he proves that for any continuous function defined on the sphere, there are four points forming an equatorial square (ie four points equally spaced along some great circle) on which the function takes equal values. Interestingly, this theorem can be used to prove the Wobbly Table theorem, that any square table can be rotated on a (possibly bumpy) floor so that all four legs touch the ground simultaneously. I found the theorem interesting, and it has the flavor of the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem (commonly explained as "there are always a pair of antipodal points on the Earth that have the same temperature and pressure"), but it bugged me that the proof was not at all similar to the standard proofs of the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem. So I found my own proof of Dyson's theorem, in the spirit of the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem. Wrote it up but didn't publish traditionally — it's at https://haggainuchi.com/wobblytable2.html https://haggainuchi.com/wobblytable2.html — but it never occurred to me to send it to Dyson or that he might be interested. Too late now, sadly.
earthicus 7y ago
What an incredible life Freeman Dyson had. The next time you have an hour free, I'd urge you to watch this autobiographical lecture he gave in 2011, "On living through four revolutions". In it, he describes his experience witnessing and participating in (1) the development of space travel, (2) nuclear energy, (3) molecular biology & the genome, and (4) computers. In addition to being absolutely fascinating and insightful, this talk does a fantastic job of showing off his wonderfully dry sense of humor! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq4p2qbE684 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq4p2qbE684
bythckr 7y ago
Freeman Dyson - Scientific bad-ass. James Dyson - Vacuum cleaner bad-ass. source: https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/diumi/has_anyone_else_ever_confused_freeman_dyson/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/diumi/has_anyone...
IGotThroughIt 7y ago
Love the man. May he RIP. He contributed greatly in debunking climate alarmism. One of the few scientists who were brave enough to go against the annoying PC culture around this issue. Good man. He did great work.
mirap 7y ago
He’s in the Dyson sphere now.
sebow 7y ago
Cool paywall.Didn't knew HN is sponsored by NYT
kwindla 7y ago
The Times obituary mentions two books that give a sense of what Dyson was like as a thinker and conversationalist. > He appeared in John McPhee’s book “The Curve of Binding Energy” (1974), a portrait of Ted Taylor, the nuclear scientist who led the Orion effort, and in Kenneth Brower’s “The Starship and the Canoe” (1978). In a memorable scene, Mr. Brower wrote of Dr. Dyson’s reunion with his son, George, who had turned his back on high technology to live in a treehouse in British Columbia and build a seafaring canoe. Both books are very much worth reading.
charlieo88 7y ago
Are they sure he’s dead and that someone hasn’t erected a shell around him absorbing all of his radiant energy?
neonate 7y ago
https://archive.md/4I0Lm https://archive.md/4I0Lm
timonoko 7y ago
Orbitsville - Urbanization of a Dyson Sphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitsville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitsville

1238 points by ChickeNES 7y ago

For anyone else that couldn't access it: https://outline.com/Aw9mRN https://outline.com/Aw9mRN http://archive.is/oqumk http://archive.is/oqumk

rtrunck 7y ago

“It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons.” ― Freeman Dyson

altonzheng 7y ago
What a beautiful quote, thank you for sharing.
jschwartzi 7y ago
This makes me think of how the story in The Expanse is proceeding.
mongol 7y ago
Sounds like Dyson believed in, or hoped for, free will, in that mind would affect the randomness that quantum physics involves. I think it would be great if it was so because the alternative would be that we are just machines. But I fear that the mind does not have that type of influence on it's fundamental parts...
- alexpetralia 7y ago
  Though I could be wrong, I believe his point was that consciousness - the mind - is the randomness underlying quantum physics.
- jackcosgrove 7y ago
  If the brain cannot consciously reprogram itself, why does studying work?
josephpmay 7y ago
That quote is mindblowing. I don't think I've ever heard an argument for free will on a sub-atomic level. It never crossed my mind that that was a position someone could conceivably hold. But it's weirdly comforting- it almost feels religious- and I'm now thinking about how that would affect emergence.
- samatman 7y ago
  Conway (yep, that Conway) and Kochen elaborate on this in the Strong Free Will Theorem: https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf
  - Causality1 7y ago
    Isn't that a fundamental misunderstanding of the definition of "observer" in quantum physics? To "observe" is to cause a quantum system to interact in such a way that collapses probabilities. Whether there is a living observer is totally irrelevant.
    - jes5199 7y ago
      if I remember correctly, this paper specifically tries to prove that those are the same
    - v77 7y ago
      I would say this is considered an open question.
      - hprotagonist 7y ago
        it is “the measurement problem”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem
      - scotty79 7y ago
        Only for non-physicists and physicists wondering about things outside of physics.
Florin_Andrei 7y ago
Related: http://nautil.us/issue/82/panpsychism/is-matter-conscious-rp http://nautil.us/issue/82/panpsychism/is-matter-conscious-rp
- jkeat 7y ago
  Here's another article that introduces the idea of panpsychism: https://aeon.co/ideas/panpsychism-is-crazy-but-its-also-most-probably-true https://aeon.co/ideas/panpsychism-is-crazy-but-its-also-most...
henriquemaia 7y ago
Lucretius, some 2000 years ago, based on a completely different kind of atomism, believed something very similar. Free will was due to random events on the atomic level, what he called clinamen (the swerve).
- analognoise 7y ago
  "The Swerve" is a great name for my punk band.
bagacrap 7y ago
I thought the observer effect of particle physics fell out of favor. This author gives a pretty persuasive argument that, at least from a theoretical physics point of view, consciousness does not create the universe. https://www.paulanlee.com/2017/04/14/consciousness-and-the-misunderstood-observer-effect/ https://www.paulanlee.com/2017/04/14/consciousness-and-the-m...
- meowface 7y ago
  It has, at least if you mean the hypothesis that the wave function is collapsed by consciousness. This doesn't rule out theories of panpsychism and panprotopsychism (or even rule those theories in?), but I don't find the arguments in favor of them convincing. I think it's plausible, but I'm skeptical. I'm also skeptical that quantum mechanics plays an important role in consciousness (beyond the role it plays in the rest of biology, and everything else in the universe), though I think that's more plausible. Dyson was a brilliant person, but I disagree with his quote there. I think we may develop a deep theory of consciousness (including solving "the hard problem") within the next century which will put some of these debates to rest.

jaredhansen 7y ago

I think it would be appropriate to break out the black bar for this one. For those not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson

s_dev 7y ago
No black bar for Dyson. The black bars overwhelmingly go to the titans of (digital) tech rather than titans of science.

vtomole 7y ago

I love his "Web of Stories": https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/1 https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/1. Rest in peace.

OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
Yes, definitely marvelous. Also a Youtube Playlist. I'll put it on, go for a walk, and the time just disappears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs1jGsn61p8&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzDA6mtmKQEgWfcIu49J4nN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs1jGsn61p8&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...

astrophysician 7y ago

About 4 years ago, I was a grad student in astrophysics at Princeton. Dyson worked at the Institute for Advanced Study which, while not officially part of the university was essentially an extension of the various departments (shared colloquiums, any researcher there was a valid thesis adviser, etc.). The grad students have a tradition (or used to) called “Thunch” (Thursday Lunch) where they invite someone to come have lunch and hang out every week. It was by far one of the highlights of my life — maybe 10 people in the room max, eating pizza, shooting shit with some of the most impressive and accomplished people you could hope to meet — Nobel prize laureates, Neil deGrasse Tyson, famous authors, whoever would respond to our invitation (people tended to say yes). Dyson was one of them. At the time he was already like 92 years old, dressed in a suit, occasionally using a handkerchief, and this guy had just published a result in Nature. The guy was SHARP at 92. Nicest, most interesting person I have ever met. Knew Einstein from his early days at IAS. Worked on an early version of the space program that looked into launching people into space with large spring loaded contraptions that were to be propelled with nuclear weapons. Those were the days I guess... So sorry to see he’s gone, the guy was a living legend.

NikolaeVarius 7y ago
He led the Orion project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls... Dyson interview from 2016 on space colonies https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/home-on-lagrange/transcript/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/home-on-lagrange/tran...
dmead 7y ago
so what you're saying is that we have nuclear trebuchets?
gbronner 7y ago
I've met him and his other daughter. They are/were wonderful people. There were a lot of "solutions" using nuclear weapons looking for a problem. There was a proposal to blow a new canal through nicaragua, to blast harbors into Alaska, etc. My roommate's father showed me his paper that anticipated fracking: drill a deep well in oil shale, through a small nuclear weapon in the bottom, blow it up and watch as the pressure and heat extract the oil and have it flow through the fractured rock back to your oil well. He almost got to test it.

starpilot 7y ago

He was the sanest mind on climate change: https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_climate_establishment https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_cl...

nerpderp82 7y ago
> Dyson contends that since carbon dioxide is good for plants, a warmer planet could be a very good thing. And if CO2 does get to be a problem, Dyson believes we can just do some genetic engineering to create a new species of super-tree that can suck up the excess. Forever the optimist!
- 2ion 7y ago
  He put too much trust into mankind. I think it's a problem really good people have almost always; they underestimate how original they are.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  That is actually work-in-process. Biological engineers are trying to upgrade C3 plants to C4, improve rubisco efficiency, and other such performance enhancers for photosynthesis. It's not so much driven by climate changes as by potential agricultural profits, though. If it were the former, they'd make an algae 2.0 and drop it in the ocean. But as C3 to C4 modification could make a hotter, drier rice with 20%-50% higher yield, that's worth a whole lot of money. Of course, that work has been underway for decades--even before CRISPR/Cas9--and golden rice got stomped for no good reason, so even if someone made a super-Sitka-pine exclusively for carbon fixation, it could still get blocked by politics.

cpach 7y ago

RIP. Here’s an article: https://www.mainepublic.org/post/renowned-mathematician-and-physicist-freeman-dyson-has-died-age-96 https://www.mainepublic.org/post/renowned-mathematician-and-...

ssivark 7y ago

A free and original thinker, who wrote well. An intellectual powerhouse with immense humility. He will be sorely missed. Here are some of his most interesting tidbits (For a man like Dyson, I'm sure there's more) 1. Birds and frogs: https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf (On two kinds of intellectual personalities) 2. The Scientist as a Rebel (essay collection): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51431.The_Scientist_as_Rebel https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51431.The_Scientist_as_R... 3. He has been thoughtfully articulate in his perspective on religion. While I can't find an appropriate link right away, definitely worth checking out. Quotes/Excerpts: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson

lzybkr 7y ago

I guess it's time to reread Starship and the Canoe - a great book about Freeman's nuclear weapon powered spaceship and his son George's interest in building boats. I thoroughly enjoyed it 25+ years ago.

sunstone 7y ago

One for the ages.

s_dev 7y ago

He was interesting character partially because he believed in God. This is actually quite rare at the very upper echelons of the scientific community.

NikolaeVarius 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson#Science_and_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson#Science_and_reli... Seems more complicated than that > I am a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian. To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension
- s_dev 7y ago
  >To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension Doesn't sound very falsifiable.
- tazedsoul 7y ago
  I truly appreciate thinkers who are able to think about God in their own original terms. His particular description of the notion of God is quite similar to my own, so this is quite nice to read.
ellis0n 7y ago
Born from the light and came back to the light I think that everything is the light with different levels form of concentration. High concentration of the light transforms to physics matter. Low level of the light is vacuum, high is atomic energy, Large Hadron Collider for example. The light is universal transmitter & transformer. The light is concentrated knowledge that is transmitted from the sun to every particle of the planet and peoples, and thanks to the light, matter and a variety of life forms are created, which creates a variety of forms of matter. The idea of Christianity about the resurrection of people is magnificent, then such great people as Dyson could be resurrected, why not? But technologies are needed in new physics and medicine, which would gain access to reality at the nanoparticle level. A 3D printer that prints the light and lays knowledge into the light to recreate a person. There is a pattern that the more we get access at the micro level, the more powerful chips we can build, and more powerful chips can calculate more hashes and allow us to bring in new gigantic machines, like telescopes and spaceships, which will give access to new macro-knowledge such as dark matter and black holes of matter-time consensus, which will allow us to create new petabyte flash drives based on light, and new the light based computers will be able to burn information directly to the points of space, and what it means to materialize any object, which will provide access to new knowledge and made new grand chips & telescopes. We already partially use the light in our rooms, networks and cameras and monitors to exchange information. New theories and machines based on the light will allow creating new machines for controlling the space-time continent and copying knowledge from any space-time, and then the task of resurrecting people becomes feasible and we can transfer the consciousness of this particular person from the past without distortion. If this happens in the next 5,000 years, then Dyson saw it right. To create such machines, we need new geniuses with Dyson's light. I'm sure we are know less about physics & light, because we live on single planet in single point of universe and our theories can be expanded when we arrive to new points of universe.

hirundo 7y ago

"When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories" "We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods." "...the computer models are very good at solving equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly." https://www.azquotes.com/author/4275-Freeman_Dyson/tag/climate-change https://www.azquotes.com/author/4275-Freeman_Dyson/tag/clima...

b0sk 7y ago
the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia resulting in bushfires, famine and drought... seas taking over the cities are all demonstrable effects of climate change. Did he live in UK? Yea the winter was milder I guess.
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  His point is, for every place that gets worse, someplace else will get better. Small consolation if you live in one of the former places, of course. But he's not wrong. Earth as a whole is a bit colder than it would be in the best of all possible universes. Other effects like ocean acidification are harder to hand-wave away. I hate cold weather, myself, but it's not just about terrestrial climate.
  - Daishiman 7y ago
    His point has been debunked time and time again. "Better" is a definition for the organisms that may inhabit a certain environment. Under no reasonable time frame for human existence is his claim even close to valid.
    - CamperBob2 7y ago

ISL 7y ago

Here's a vote for an HN black bar. Dyson's work was incredible.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jeswin 7y ago
I think prevailing opinion here is that it should be left to the admins. The black bar is not a measure of the notability of someone's contributions, but rather is about their connection or impact to YC/HN (and the HN community). Personally I agree with that. The newspapers will have great obituaries anyway.

kkwteh 7y ago

I particularly enjoyed being immersed in the ethos of engineering, which is very different from the ethos of science. A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering. Dyson said this while describing his time working on the Orion project. It had a profound effect on me and it has always stuck with me.

sadfev 7y ago

No! He was a hero to any aspiring physicist. I can’t even begin to list his accomplishments!

Freestyler_3 7y ago

I think last week someone mentioned the dyson sphere with a link to wiki. It said he regretted they named it after him.

mcrider 7y ago
Huh, I'd be curious to see that source. I know he somewhat recanted the idea of a Dyson sphere, as it is completely impractical even with unimagined technology (re: tensile strength of the materials, and preventing such a megastructure from falling into the sun whenever a rock hits it). But he later proposed the idea of a Dyson swarm, an extremely large array of solar-sucking satellites orbiting the sun as an idea that's theoretically possible even with today's technology.
- theothermkn 7y ago
  One thing that's slightly interesting about Dyson Sphere's is that spherical shells of matter exert exactly no gravitational pull at any point in their interiors. That is, the integral of gravitational pull over the whole shell is identically 0 for every point inside the shell.* This goes for any force that falls off by the inverse square rule, e.g. the electrostatic force. In short, there's no practical way to stick an atmosphere, much less a civilization composed of life forms that depend on gravity, to the inside of the sphere, even if the other engineering challenges could be overcome. * One thing that's suddenly more interesting to me now is if the space at any point is being "pulled" equally in all directions, resulting in zero force, or if the bends in space-time cancel out. In the limit, for example, could you "tear" space-time inside a dense enough and/or heavy enough shell of matter?
  - papreclip 7y ago
    think about the 2d equivalent - a ball rolls down a hill because the potential gradient directs it that way. a ball sitting on a flat pedestal isn't being pulled in every horizontal direction at once by some forces that are proportional to the height of the pedestal. it's not being pulled horizontally at all there is zero space-time curvature within the sphere, it's "flat", so there's no force. nothing is "cancelled out", force is the derivative of energy with respect to space. it's like a 3d pedestal (or rather, a cylinder excavated from the earth with a flat bottom)

gwern 7y ago

Noted physicist slain by oldest foe, gravity: "Mia Dyson says her father, at the age of 96 still regularly went to his office at Princeton University. On Wednesday, on such a visit, she says he suffered a fall and died of his injuries Friday morning." TBIs and elder falling are a terrifying source of morbidity and mortality. So many old people start their terminal decline when they fall, for no particularly good reason. (Even when it doesn't immediately kill them, it can contribute to a downward spiral of ill health, less activity, and iatrogenics.) Who knows how much longer Dyson could have lived if his foot hadn't slipped?

dmix 7y ago
What an interesting perspective to consider and a statement on human fragility, especially in the context of such a great man.
- gwern 7y ago
  Unfortunately, no matter how great you are, you are still a few pounds of grayish peanut butter in a calcium jar.
tartoran 7y ago
Or to look at it from a different angle, their fall is caused by their old age decline which in turn triggers their terminal decline. I've seen it throughout my family, once confined to bed at old age one's decline accelerates quickly. It's perhaps that the lack of movement that has some spiraling effect on their health. More and more people should not stop doing sports when they get older, they should do sports less vigorously as they age but movement regime should stay.
- tzs 7y ago
  I wonder how much of this depends on how big a change there is in movement? Would a lifelong couch potato for whom their post fall movement is only a few percent less than what it was before the fall be less affected than someone who had been very active before their fall and had to cut their movement by 95%?

melling 7y ago

Started writing "later” in life: “Life begins at 55, the age at which I published my first book,” he wrote in “From Eros to Gaia,” Never got his PhD. Taught physics at Cornell. Thoughts on climate change: "Relishing the role of iconoclast, he confounded the scientific establishment by dismissing the consensus about the perils of man-made climate change as “tribal group-thinking.” He doubted the veracity of the climate models, and he exasperated experts with sanguine predictions they found rooted less in science than in wishfulness: Excess carbon in the air is good for plants, and global warming might forestall another ice age." Lots worth reading in the NYT obituary.

m0zg 7y ago
>> Excess carbon in the air is good for plants, and global warming might forestall another ice age. How is it not "rooted in science" that excess carbon is good for plants? We're already seeing significant global greening, and yields are up. Excess CO2 also reduces the amount of water the plants need.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  He's gone, so this isn't really the place for this discussion at all. However, I'm glad this is mentioned and how it shows that there are a lot of intelligent people who have concerns with the current science debate. Consensus isn't science, it's politics, and challenging ones ideas is how we both reinforce the truth as well as dispel myths.
  - naiveprogrammer 7y ago
    Amen
  - m0zg 7y ago
    It's just annoying that some snooty reporter is trying to shit on this great man's legacy by speaking of things they do not understand.
  - aeorgnoieang 7y ago

injb 7y ago

What a loss. There's a fantastic and epic interview with him on youtube here[1]. He tells stories of famous people he knew, meeting Wittgenstein, arguing with Teller, going on a road trip across the country with Feynman etc. Solid gold stuff. I've heard occasional attacks on him over the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg. But I think this is worth a read[2]. He speaks very frankly about what they did and his involvement. It's clear how he felt about it, but he never tries to make excuses for himself. That impressed me about his character in a way that's hard to explain. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzDA6mtmKQEgWfcIu49J4nN https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzDA6mtmKQE... [2] http://www.bible-researcher.com/dresden/dyson.html http://www.bible-researcher.com/dresden/dyson.html

lordleft 7y ago

Rest in Peace. And amazing example of academic and intellectual success sans-phd.

dang 7y ago

Url changed from https://twitter.com/gbrumfiel/status/1233434046266531840 https://twitter.com/gbrumfiel/status/1233434046266531840 to a more substantive article (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22444492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22444492).

dannylandau 7y ago

Worth watching, Freemon Dyson life stories -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs1jGsn61p8&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzDA6mtmKQEgWfcIu49J4nN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs1jGsn61p8&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...

jolesf 7y ago

Infinite in All Directions is still one of my favorite science books. "Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many common features. They share these features also with other enterprises such as art, literature, and music. The most salient features of all these enterprises are discipline and diversity. Discipline to submerge the individual fantasy in a greater whole. Diversity to give scope to the infinite variety of human souls and temperaments. Without discipline there can be no greatness. Without diversity there can be no freedom. Greatness for the enterprise, freedom for the individual- these are the two themes, contrasting but not incompatible, that make up the history of science and the history of religion."

gigama 7y ago
"Infinite In All Directions" is right here in my current reading stack next to Loren Eiseley's "All The Strange Hours"... they live on through their written words and all the lives they touched.

adpirz 7y ago

I really feel like it's worth having this discussion: the black bar for Freeman Dyson, but not for Katherine Johnson who died earlier this week. At the time I thought it was likely because she wasn't _directly_ involved in computing and tried to write it off, but Freeman seems to be as related to the page as her. I bring it up because it really does speak to how a community decides who they want to include or not. Unless I've missed some specific guidelines, it sends unwelcoming signals to me.

krapp 7y ago
The community doesn't decide who gets the black bar or not, and there are no published guidelines. AFAIK it's entirely the personal preference of the admins, or possibly just dang. Maybe Katherine Johnson just wasn't considered notable enough, or maybe the story just wasn't noticed. I wouldn't necessarily attribute it to sexism, though - there have been male obits that haven't gotten the black bar either.
- BoorishBears 7y ago
  The story was noticed, it was one of the top stories of the day and had similar comments https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F09rtt53,%2Fm%2F030xd https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F09r... I know, I know, the mostly white people that make up classic HN don't really care about someone who's important to black people. Sure there was a Best Picture nominated movie in large part about her story along with some of the people she worked with but you know not the HN's cup of tea not being about someone who lectured at Stanford or something. But alas... I know I know, classic HN is going to take great exception to me insinuating they are anything less than the most racially aware people with "a ton of black friends" and “they don’t see color” (maybe even one of the few other black guys here will show up and represent them) and this comment will be buried.
the5dysfunction 7y ago
I imagine the distinction is that one was a human calculator, and the other was a unique and brilliant mind. I don't see how their gender and/or race has anything to do with it. My guess is if you're looking for sexism and 'unwelcoming signals' you're going to find them everywhere.

jpmattia 7y ago

For fans of Physics Today, they have put up a link to articles authored by Dyson over the years: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/action/doSearch?AllField=freeman+and+dyson&startPage&ContribAuthorStored=Dyson%2C+Freeman+J https://physicstoday.scitation.org/action/doSearch?AllField=...

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Rebelgecko 7y ago

The obit refers to him as "Dr. Dyson". Did he ever get a doctorate? edit: I'll leave this up for posterity, but the answer is no. The article explains the discrepancy.

Iwan-Zotow 7y ago
"Freeman Dyson, renowned physicist and educator, today (May 17) received an honorary doctor of science degree at Clarkson University"

dr_dshiv 7y ago

A few years ago, I asked Freeman Dyson what we should teach our children so there would be more Freeman Dyson's. He gave a surprising answer. He said we should teach children to genetically "play" with plants. He thought we needed that kind of creativity as a human species if we would ever be able to populate the asteroid belt. He said that most of the surface area of the solar system is in the asteroid belt -- but the only way we could really live out there was if we could create warm blooded plants.

EForEndeavour 7y ago
Isn't the large total surface area of the asteroid belt overwhelmed by drawbacks like unusability of most of it for most purposes (uneven, unstable, unshielded, etc.), and the fact that humans do really poorly in microgravity?
- aeorgnoieang 7y ago
  Those drawbacks are only true on some (possible) timescales. The biggest drawback currently, for human settlement of the asteroid belt, is that we can't afford to send anyone there! Freeman Dyson's the person after which the Dyson sphere is named, so the current (relative) "unusability" of asteroids or the fact that humans currently seem to "do really poorly in microgravity" are 'just' additional obstacles to be overcome sometime in the future from the perspective in which space megastructures are possible.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  One question I really hope we can answer someday: exactly how little gravity do humans need before it becomes too "micro"? Can humans stay healthy on Mars? On the Moon? On Ceres or Enceladus or Pluto or Charon or yet smaller bodies? But yeah, I don't think "surface area" is the right angle to look at. More like "volume within a sufficient depth". A lot of (most?) asteroids and comets consist primarily of water ice, and water happens to be pretty darn good at radioactive shielding, so if we build habitats inside the asteroids we'd have a solid chance of significantly addressing that particular hazard (and also have plenty of water for drinking / agriculture / fuel).
- 7y ago

jonjacky 7y ago

A book called something like 'Quantum Mysteries for Bluffers' described his work on QED this way: Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga independently discovered quantum electrodynamics. Then Freeman Dyson explained it -- to the first three!

dorchadas 7y ago

While at undergraduate studying physics, I once emailed Dyson asking about something he had written with regards to NASA, and what he thought the future of space travel was. I always remember he took the time to respond and email me back. Was really nice, especially as he gets no telling how many emails a day, and easily could've ignored it.

jes5199 7y ago

My favorite thing about Dyson was that, in the middle of doing atomic research, he plotted a graph of the total number of nuclear tests done every year, and saw that it was increasing exponentially - which caused him to reverse his position on the use of nuclear devices, and argue to cancel his own project and all similar projects. from Dyson's 1962 memo on the Test Ban Treaty: "The choice, whether or not to accept a test-ban agreement, is thus not a choice between two static situations, one without testing and the other with testing at some constant rate. This choice seems rather to be, either to stop tests, or to continue to double the rate of testing every three years ad infinitum."

pictur 7y ago

So?

bhickey 7y ago

Between ten and fifteen years ago I was at a colloquium featuring Leon Cooper, Craig Venter and Freeman Dyson (via video). At one point in the conversation, Dyson slumped over only to rouse a few minutes later. He rejoined the conversation without missing a beat.

wiggles_md 7y ago

Why does Freeman Dyson earn a black bar, and Katherine Johnson not?

sykick 7y ago
My interpretation of your question is that underlying it is a belief that Katherine Johnson ought to have gotten a black bar given that Freeman Dyson got one. Can you elaborate on why you think they both ought to have gotten or neither of them should have gotten one? Would you have asked why Freeman Dyson did not get a black bar if the roles had been reversed?
arionhardison 7y ago
I believe it is rude to ask this question, mainly because you already know the answer and there is no value to be derived from the discussion; therefore it is best to simply allow people to focus on Dyson. A great scientist has died and people should be able to reflect and pay their respect to the life that he lived. It is not fair to ask people to feel the way you feel and the black bar denotes a feeling of mourning. My friends and I had a math games night to honor Katherine Johnson and it was amazing but we would never ask those of another culture to feel the same way or have the same connection with her that we did.
oska 7y ago
I think the answer to this is that it is their site and their honour to bestow.

irthomasthomas 7y ago

"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York."

jdm2212 7y ago
This appears to be untrue: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/32538/was-hay-invented-only-in-the-middle-ages-in-europe https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/32538/was-hay-in...

skilled 7y ago

Why does HN assume I have a Times subscription?

mhh__ 7y ago

With the exception of his views on climate change, he was probably my favourite living physicist. 94 years is an extremely good (I realise this now that I have a single grandparent left, one down before I was born) innings, but what a shame.

alpb 7y ago

It would be great if the moderators could change the link to a non-paywalled link.

fermenflo 7y ago

Damn, I'm doing research involving partitions right now. I used crank/rank all the time -invariants that he introduced years ago. What a shame, RIP

morphle 7y ago

Freeman Dyson exposed and explained Richard Feynmans genius to the world, but he had better blue thoughts (see my other links in this discussion) than Feynman had ("Plenty Of Room At The Bottom"), on a par with Alan Kay's blue thoughts. He imagined the Dyson Sphere that set me on my path to Science, Carl Sagan just gave the last push. He imagined the space chicken and the Kuiper belt/Oort cloud plants. His carbon cycle ideas have still not been researched seriously. His essay on the origens of life (started by Gödel) are still ringing in my brain. His view of big Napoleon versus small tabletop science is a very valid analysis of our current crises in science and his solution is to be kind to the mad scientists and heretics. By far his best interview is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBjVHLBEsHI&list=PLzLGaX_JvmJoIGJFR_1M088pMz68qUtnc&index=6&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBjVHLBEsHI&list=PLzLGaX_Jvm.... It is also on bittorrent and Peertube. The rest of the Glorious Accident series is worth it as well, especially the group discussion at the end.

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irthomasthomas 7y ago
Blue thoughts?

ck2 7y ago

May seem trivial but the Dyson Sphere was the most amazing thing I ever learned about though Star Trek, awe inspiring in that it really is theoretically possible for us to build in thousands of years.

tazedsoul 7y ago

Bittersweet news -- but he lived a productive and long life. I came upon parasitic numbers by researching Freeman Dyson one day. Very cool. Read up on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_number

hermitcrab 7y ago

His paper "Time without end : Physics and biology in an open universe" is worth a read: http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ay1/RevModPhys.51.447.pdf http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ay1/RevModPhys.51.447.pdf

DesiLurker 7y ago

He should be buried in a spherical grave! then he would always be in his dyson sphere. RIP!!

amha 7y ago

I heard him speak in 2004, when I was 17. Here's what I wrote in my LiveJournal at the time: On Thursday, I saw Freeman Dyson speak at Cornell. He was so amazing I can't even describe it. I didn’t look at my watch once during the speech. Not long into the talk, the elderly gentleman next to me pulled a scrap of paper out of his pocket and began scribbling notes. He kept writing until the end of the speech. I glanced behind me during the question-and-answer period, and noticed that Schwartz Auditorium was so full that people were standing in the balcony and sitting on the railings just to hear Dyson. The text of Dyson’s speech would have impressed any English teacher. He structured it as seven short stories, with each one slowly building on each other. The style of his writing––the way he chose his words and structured his sentences––would have been impressive if he had been giving a lecture in the humanities, much less a field stereotyped for less-able communicators. The way Dyson was able to convey the sheer wonder of science was an orgasmic experience equivalent to reading my first Carl Sagan book. An 80-year-old physicist who had the energy of a young assistant professor, who delivered his speech fluidly and responded deftly to the audience’s questions––a scientist proficient in more than one science, and fluent enough in biology to give an entire lecture on biotechnology!!!! Oh wow...

matheist 7y ago

A couple of years ago I got interested in an old paper of his, "Continuous Functions Defined on Spheres", where he proves that for any continuous function defined on the sphere, there are four points forming an equatorial square (ie four points equally spaced along some great circle) on which the function takes equal values. Interestingly, this theorem can be used to prove the Wobbly Table theorem, that any square table can be rotated on a (possibly bumpy) floor so that all four legs touch the ground simultaneously. I found the theorem interesting, and it has the flavor of the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem (commonly explained as "there are always a pair of antipodal points on the Earth that have the same temperature and pressure"), but it bugged me that the proof was not at all similar to the standard proofs of the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem. So I found my own proof of Dyson's theorem, in the spirit of the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem. Wrote it up but didn't publish traditionally — it's at https://haggainuchi.com/wobblytable2.html https://haggainuchi.com/wobblytable2.html — but it never occurred to me to send it to Dyson or that he might be interested. Too late now, sadly.

earthicus 7y ago

What an incredible life Freeman Dyson had. The next time you have an hour free, I'd urge you to watch this autobiographical lecture he gave in 2011, "On living through four revolutions". In it, he describes his experience witnessing and participating in (1) the development of space travel, (2) nuclear energy, (3) molecular biology & the genome, and (4) computers. In addition to being absolutely fascinating and insightful, this talk does a fantastic job of showing off his wonderfully dry sense of humor! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq4p2qbE684 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq4p2qbE684

bythckr 7y ago

Freeman Dyson - Scientific bad-ass. James Dyson - Vacuum cleaner bad-ass. source: https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/diumi/has_anyone_else_ever_confused_freeman_dyson/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/diumi/has_anyone...

IGotThroughIt 7y ago

Love the man. May he RIP. He contributed greatly in debunking climate alarmism. One of the few scientists who were brave enough to go against the annoying PC culture around this issue. Good man. He did great work.

mirap 7y ago

He’s in the Dyson sphere now.

sebow 7y ago

Cool paywall.Didn't knew HN is sponsored by NYT

kwindla 7y ago

The Times obituary mentions two books that give a sense of what Dyson was like as a thinker and conversationalist. > He appeared in John McPhee’s book “The Curve of Binding Energy” (1974), a portrait of Ted Taylor, the nuclear scientist who led the Orion effort, and in Kenneth Brower’s “The Starship and the Canoe” (1978). In a memorable scene, Mr. Brower wrote of Dr. Dyson’s reunion with his son, George, who had turned his back on high technology to live in a treehouse in British Columbia and build a seafaring canoe. Both books are very much worth reading.

charlieo88 7y ago

Are they sure he’s dead and that someone hasn’t erected a shell around him absorbing all of his radiant energy?

neonate 7y ago

https://archive.md/4I0Lm https://archive.md/4I0Lm

timonoko 7y ago

Orbitsville - Urbanization of a Dyson Sphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitsville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitsville