Dyson: Freeman

Dyson, Freeman, Introduction. In Cornwell, John (editor). Nature s Imagination The Frontiers of Scientific Vision (New York Oxford University Press, 2000). 

Dyson, Freeman, The Two Windows. In Templeton, John Marks (editor). How Large is Godl (Radnor, Pennyslvania Templeton Foundation Press, 1997). 

Dyson, Freeman J. Infinite in all Directions. Harper Row, New York. 1988. Dyson, Freeman J.. From Eros to Gaia. Pantheon Books, New York. 1992. 

Dyson, Freeman. Disturbing the Universe. New York Harper Row, 1979. 

Freeman Dyson considers that any theory on the origin of life which begins with cooperative organisation in a large population of molecules, and makes no provision for short circuits in the metabolic pathways, will be met by the criticism just described (Dyson, 1985). 

Irrelevant of one s personal opinion, Freeman Dyson s toy model has enriched and enlarged the potpourri of (sometimes) bold theories by one further bouncy, glitzy hypothesis. 

It was only four years later that Lord Kelvin (nee William Thomson) came across the Essay. He kindly arranged for it to be reprinted in Crelle s Journal, and enthusiastically promoted Green s work in Britain and Europe. The enormous impact of Green s legacy on today s world of science has been clearly assessed by Freeman Dyson (1993). 

This view is held, although not always expressed as an adherence to the anthropic principle, by several authors in the field. For example Freeman Dyson (1985) writes ... 

As we muse about language, let s start with the words of one of my heroes, visionary physicist Freeman Dyson, who reminds us that humans are a species of ape that only recently climbed down from the trees. He writes ... 

In five billion years, the fuel in our Sun will be exhausted, and the Sun will begin to die and expand, becoming a red giant. At some point, our oceans will boil away. No one on Earth will be alive to see a red glow filling most of the sky. As Freeman Dyson once said, No matter how deep we burrow into the Earth... we can only postpone by a few million years our miserable end. ... 

Freeman Dyson, Science Religion No Ends in Sight, ... 

Similarly, throughout history, mathematicians have called novel geometrical ideas pathological or monstrous. Physicist Freeman Dyson recognized this for fractals, intricate structures that today have revolutionized mathematics and physics but in the past were treated with trepidation ... 

The upbeat feelings of theoretical physicist Freeman J. Dyson best express my beliefs ... 

P. A. M. Dirac (quoted by Freeman Dyson, From Eros to Gaia, p. 305) said the only basis for my work and the only reliable basis. .. which was sufficiently general so as to secure me from making the same mistake again was to set up a principle of mathematical beauty to say that we really don t know what the basic equations of physics are, but they have to have great mathematical beauty. See also [6]. 

Dyson, in a letter to Chandrasekhar which the latter quotes, suggests that Dirac had arrived at that position when later work shewed that his physical logic had been flawed, but that his final equations were left intact, leading him to conclude that one should not trust the physical logic but should only trust the mathematical beauty (Chandrasekhar, 1994). Such, at any rate, is the analysis of Freeman Dyson whose reading of the matter is surely the most cogent and informed in the world today. 

Enrico Fermi quoted to Freeman Dyson those words of von Neumann Dyson F (2004) Nature 427 297... 

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