5 ms·

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 u

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.
- matthewmcg 7y ago
  Nuclear fracking was tested as part of the larger series of tests called Operation Plowshare. You can read about the first gas extraction test here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy If I remember correctly, the tests worked, in that they produced a large amount of gas from tight rock formations. However the gas was mildly radioactive and it was thought that it would not be marketable.
- ticmasta 7y ago
  Total was floating the idea of doing just this in Alberta a recently as the past decade. The science really seems to work but the idea of a small nuclear explosion in your backyard (on purpose is a hard sell (even for the relatively open-to-nuclear French!)
- eesmith 7y ago
  Minor point concerning "anticipated fracking" - hydraulic fracking dates from no later than the late 1940s, as you can see from this 1949 paper: https://www.onepetro.org/journal-paper/SPE-949001-G https://www.onepetro.org/journal-paper/SPE-949001-G . "THE ATOM UNDERGROUND" is an educational video, available from https://archive.org/details/32212AtomUnderground https://archive.org/details/32212AtomUnderground (undated; likely late 1960s). It includes some video from the 1967 test of Project Gasbuggy that matthewmcg mentions.
- bori5 7y ago
  In a similar vein there’s a story and YouTube video of Russians plugging an out of control burning oil well with a small nuke. Edit. It was a gas well here’s the link https://youtu.be/S57Xq03njsc https://youtu.be/S57Xq03njsc
  - bori5 7y ago
    RIP Freeman Dyson. Apologies for drifting from main thread, fell for the oldest trick in the HN book.
  - imglorp 7y ago
    Successfully. I wonder if that trick will ever be needed again in the future. It sounds like they had a special situation with a thick layer of permeable rock on the surface preventing them from capping it.
aardvarks 7y ago
He would sometimes eat lunch with us postdocs (just randomly, on a whim) when I was a postdoc at IAS. He would always have something interesting to say or ask, generally about science but often offbeat or unexpected -- you couldn't help but notice both his wide-ranging intellectual interests (our field was not quite within his main expertise) and his very gracious manner in starting conversations that both he and we would learn from.
- astrophysician 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing — yea completely agree, it’s always so much fun to be around people like Dyson. There’s more like him at Princeton (and everywhere else, I was at university if Illinois for undergrad and the story is the same there), they just get a kick out of being curious, and always are genuinely interested to learn and hear new things, no matter how old they get. Such a pleasure to be around — they aren’t bitter or insecure, they don’t have anything to prove, they just think that some things are just so gosh darn cool, and that fun energy is contagious.
  - refurb 7y ago
    I had a professor in graduate school like that. He was probably 70 and did natural product chemistry. Unlike the other professors who were hard asses because: 1) they were still making a name for themselves or 2) they dealt with it in grad school, so you should too, he was the friendliest, most curious person. You could be a 2nd year undergrad and if you asked an interesting question, he’d get genuinely excited about it.
aaronharnly 7y ago
Some friends invited him to dine with us as undergrads at Princeton – he came, was sparkling and smart, told us about his eccentric "metabolism before replication" ideas about the origin of life, and was just wonderful to listen to and talk with. He is a true intellectual hero of mine, and the world is much poorer for his absence.
- bitexploder 7y ago
  He left behind a wealth of ideas and works that will live on. His generation of scientist are all true pioneers that broke so much ground in science. They have left the world a richer place.
AceJohnny2 7y ago
> the guy was a living legend. And now he's a legend.
joering2 7y ago
Neil deGrasse Tyson?
- astrophysician 7y ago
  NDT came to Thunch several times, but unfortunately not while I was there -- we exchanged e-mails (I was responsible for booking the Thunch guests) and he was excited to come, made tentative plans, but it ended up not working out. The guy is pretty busy these days. He was a post-doc at Princeton back in his research days, so he still keeps in touch with the department every now and then.
virtue3 7y ago
Not the worst idea ever... tbh Project Orion: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php#boomboom http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php... Given what we have available to us. It gives us the most propulsive force. Lots of hard problems to solve :)
hermitcrab 7y ago
What a legend. I met him briefly at the "Festival of inappropriate technology" in the UK some years back. When I asked if project Orion (nuclear powered rockets) should have gone ahead he said (paraphrasing from memory): All big engineering projects killed people, but it probably wasn't worth the extra radiation in the atmosphere.
photon_lines 7y ago
Actually, he was one of the main motivators for me to do something which I just finished today: to explain what Maxwell's equations mean in simple terms. I read his paper a few months ago explaining why Maxwell's equations were so hard to grasp, and I was awe struck at how great of a writer and communicator he was: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4317784_Why_is_Maxwell's_Theory_so_hard_to_understand https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4317784_Why_is_Maxw... Rest in piece Mr. Dyson - you're a legend and you'll always be remembered.
- tmearnest 7y ago
  Is this a manuscript you just finished? I’d love to read it if so.
  - photon_lines 7y ago
    It's actually a guide which tries to explain Maxwell's equations in a visual / intuitive manner - you can find it here: https://github.com/photonlines/Intuitive-Guide-to-Maxwells-Equations https://github.com/photonlines/Intuitive-Guide-to-Maxwells-E...
- saijanai 7y ago
  https://sci-hub.tw/10.1049/ic.2007.1146 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1049/ic.2007.1146
john4534243 7y ago
What makes some people remain sharp at old age ? My observation is it can be attributed to practicing intellectually challenging jobs continually. For example Don Kunth, Marvin Minsky are and were sharp. Is this observation a surviour ship bias or is it mostly genetics ?
- InquilineKea 7y ago
  Actually someone I know who knows Minsky says that Minsky wasn't really sharp towards his later years [that said, he still mentored students, and the Nectome cofounder was one of his last students]..

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.

matthewmcg 7y ago
Nuclear fracking was tested as part of the larger series of tests called Operation Plowshare. You can read about the first gas extraction test here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy If I remember correctly, the tests worked, in that they produced a large amount of gas from tight rock formations. However the gas was mildly radioactive and it was thought that it would not be marketable.
ticmasta 7y ago
Total was floating the idea of doing just this in Alberta a recently as the past decade. The science really seems to work but the idea of a small nuclear explosion in your backyard (on purpose is a hard sell (even for the relatively open-to-nuclear French!)
eesmith 7y ago
Minor point concerning "anticipated fracking" - hydraulic fracking dates from no later than the late 1940s, as you can see from this 1949 paper: https://www.onepetro.org/journal-paper/SPE-949001-G https://www.onepetro.org/journal-paper/SPE-949001-G . "THE ATOM UNDERGROUND" is an educational video, available from https://archive.org/details/32212AtomUnderground https://archive.org/details/32212AtomUnderground (undated; likely late 1960s). It includes some video from the 1967 test of Project Gasbuggy that matthewmcg mentions.
bori5 7y ago
In a similar vein there’s a story and YouTube video of Russians plugging an out of control burning oil well with a small nuke. Edit. It was a gas well here’s the link https://youtu.be/S57Xq03njsc https://youtu.be/S57Xq03njsc
- bori5 7y ago
  RIP Freeman Dyson. Apologies for drifting from main thread, fell for the oldest trick in the HN book.
- imglorp 7y ago
  Successfully. I wonder if that trick will ever be needed again in the future. It sounds like they had a special situation with a thick layer of permeable rock on the surface preventing them from capping it.

aardvarks 7y ago

He would sometimes eat lunch with us postdocs (just randomly, on a whim) when I was a postdoc at IAS. He would always have something interesting to say or ask, generally about science but often offbeat or unexpected -- you couldn't help but notice both his wide-ranging intellectual interests (our field was not quite within his main expertise) and his very gracious manner in starting conversations that both he and we would learn from.

astrophysician 7y ago
Thanks for sharing — yea completely agree, it’s always so much fun to be around people like Dyson. There’s more like him at Princeton (and everywhere else, I was at university if Illinois for undergrad and the story is the same there), they just get a kick out of being curious, and always are genuinely interested to learn and hear new things, no matter how old they get. Such a pleasure to be around — they aren’t bitter or insecure, they don’t have anything to prove, they just think that some things are just so gosh darn cool, and that fun energy is contagious.
- refurb 7y ago
  I had a professor in graduate school like that. He was probably 70 and did natural product chemistry. Unlike the other professors who were hard asses because: 1) they were still making a name for themselves or 2) they dealt with it in grad school, so you should too, he was the friendliest, most curious person. You could be a 2nd year undergrad and if you asked an interesting question, he’d get genuinely excited about it.

aaronharnly 7y ago

Some friends invited him to dine with us as undergrads at Princeton – he came, was sparkling and smart, told us about his eccentric "metabolism before replication" ideas about the origin of life, and was just wonderful to listen to and talk with. He is a true intellectual hero of mine, and the world is much poorer for his absence.

bitexploder 7y ago
He left behind a wealth of ideas and works that will live on. His generation of scientist are all true pioneers that broke so much ground in science. They have left the world a richer place.

AceJohnny2 7y ago

> the guy was a living legend. And now he's a legend.

joering2 7y ago

Neil deGrasse Tyson?

astrophysician 7y ago
NDT came to Thunch several times, but unfortunately not while I was there -- we exchanged e-mails (I was responsible for booking the Thunch guests) and he was excited to come, made tentative plans, but it ended up not working out. The guy is pretty busy these days. He was a post-doc at Princeton back in his research days, so he still keeps in touch with the department every now and then.

virtue3 7y ago

Not the worst idea ever... tbh Project Orion: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php#boomboom http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php... Given what we have available to us. It gives us the most propulsive force. Lots of hard problems to solve :)

hermitcrab 7y ago

What a legend. I met him briefly at the "Festival of inappropriate technology" in the UK some years back. When I asked if project Orion (nuclear powered rockets) should have gone ahead he said (paraphrasing from memory): All big engineering projects killed people, but it probably wasn't worth the extra radiation in the atmosphere.

photon_lines 7y ago

Actually, he was one of the main motivators for me to do something which I just finished today: to explain what Maxwell's equations mean in simple terms. I read his paper a few months ago explaining why Maxwell's equations were so hard to grasp, and I was awe struck at how great of a writer and communicator he was: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4317784_Why_is_Maxwell's_Theory_so_hard_to_understand https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4317784_Why_is_Maxw... Rest in piece Mr. Dyson - you're a legend and you'll always be remembered.

tmearnest 7y ago
Is this a manuscript you just finished? I’d love to read it if so.
- photon_lines 7y ago
  It's actually a guide which tries to explain Maxwell's equations in a visual / intuitive manner - you can find it here: https://github.com/photonlines/Intuitive-Guide-to-Maxwells-Equations https://github.com/photonlines/Intuitive-Guide-to-Maxwells-E...
saijanai 7y ago
https://sci-hub.tw/10.1049/ic.2007.1146 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1049/ic.2007.1146

john4534243 7y ago

What makes some people remain sharp at old age ? My observation is it can be attributed to practicing intellectually challenging jobs continually. For example Don Kunth, Marvin Minsky are and were sharp. Is this observation a surviour ship bias or is it mostly genetics ?

InquilineKea 7y ago
Actually someone I know who knows Minsky says that Minsky wasn't really sharp towards his later years [that said, he still mentored students, and the Nectome cofounder was one of his last students]..