![]() ![]() The project ultimately failed, however, following the signing of the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963. In 1958, they submitted a proposal to ARPA for a working space vehicle, weighing in at four thousand tons, carrying 2,600 bombs, and were awarded just under a million dollars for a feasibility study. ![]() ![]() Vitally, the body of the ship would withstand almost three thousand explosions without melting because the nuclear bursts would be short-akin to a human being able to run barefoot over hot coals without burning their feet. Together they crunched the numbers and calculated that exploding nuclear warheads could indeed lift a ship the size of downtown Chicago into orbit. The idea for an interstellar ship powered by nuclear bombs was the brainchild of Dyson’s colleague Ted Taylor. Against the backdrop of the space race with Russia, the atmosphere was ripe for giant leaps of invention, at which Dyson excelled. In a chapter by Dyson’s son George, Orion is described as the mission of Dyson’s dreams. Later, he crossed the Atlantic and carried out his most significant work on quantum theory before moving on to Project Orion-run in the 1950s and 60s by the US Air Force, ARPA (now DARPA) and NASA-where he was tasked with designing an interstellar spacecraft. His university degree in mathematics at the University of Cambridge was similarly disrupted by a stint with the British Royal Air Force Bomber Command, where he calculated ideal bomb formations against German targets in the Second World War. As war broke out while he was in high school, classroom time was reduced-a situation sadly familiar to school children in the pandemic.ĭyson would later bristle at “predigested science” being taught as a “rigid and authoritarian” set of rules, with “kids…kept chained to their desks.”ĭyson’s frog-like hopping appears to be a survival strategy demanded during his formative years. Although he attended elite schools, Dyson had little to no formal science education in his early years. The son of a musician and a lawyer, Dyson likened the practice of mathematics to playing the violin, a creative act driven by beauty. In the opening chapter, physics journalist Amanda Gefter searches for the childhood roots of Dyson’s unshackled imagination and his rebellious spirit. He famously described himself as a frog among birds, where birds “fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon” while frogs “live in the mud below and…delight in the details of particular objects, and…solve problems one at a time.” This frog-like propensity allowed him to hop back and forth between astrophysics, engineering, nuclear physics, mathematics, cosmology, chemistry and more, and crucially to deploy the deep analytical skills needed to make profound contributions in the fields he touched. But Dyson was in some sense an academic outsider, never having earned a doctorate, yet holding positions at prestigious academic institutions. ![]() The title of the book is ironic, based on a quip made by Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman when Dyson’s work was praised at a physics conference. But Dyson was also famed for his imaginative flair, allowing him to develop blueprints for interstellar spacecrafts powered by nuclear bombs, posit the existence of “Dyson spheres”-star-enveloping technologies created by advanced alien civilizations-and propose an unfashionable “dual origin” theory for how life arose.Ī recent collection of essays edited by MIT physicist David Kaiser, “Well, Doc, You’re In”: Freeman Dyson’s Journey through the Universe, invited 10 scientists, journalists, and historians-including two of Dyson’s children-to reflect on many facets of his research. With a career spanning almost 80 years, Dyson is most celebrated for his contributions to the foundations of quantum physics. Visionary, maverick, iconoclast, rebel, genius-all words that have been used to describe the late English-American physicist Freeman Dyson, who died in 2020 and would have turned 99 years old this week. And we shall only find out what they are if we go out and look for them.įreeman Dyson to J. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our present-day science. ![]()
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