Dyson’s optimism and broad-spectrum thinking

From Salon:

In his new collection of essays, “A Many-Colored Glass,” renowned physicist Freeman Dyson turns his thoughts to do-it-yourself biotech and breeding one’s own pet lizard, the fallacies of global warming science, science fiction (with a tip of the hat to recently departed Madeleine L’Engle) and the importance of biology to the future of religion. To Dyson, a deeper understanding of the human brain means a better understanding of theology and perhaps more tolerance for those with different beliefs.

Such broad-spectrum thinking, particularly for a scientist, usually puts you in one of two camps: quack or genius. Dyson has been called both. Yet his penchant for challenging conventional wisdom is matched by a sense of humor, a necessary attribute for any scientist who has seen seven decades’ worth of scientific hits and flops — some of them his own.

In the science world, Dyson is best known for unifying the three versions of quantum electrodynamics invented by Julian Schwinger, Shinichiro Tomonaga and his friend and colleague Richard Feynman. But it’s his broader writings on nuclear weapons, the science of immortality and the expectation of extraterrestrial intelligence that have captured the public.

Dyson is quick to remind readers that he’s a scientist, not a soothsayer. He has said that “it is better to be wrong than to be vague” and has certainly suffered the former rather than the latter. Recalling his advice to a young Francis Crick to stick with physics rather than waste his time in biology, Dyson quips, “When I was a young and arrogant physicist, I tried to predict the future of physics and biology. Even a smart 22-year-old is not a reliable guide to the future of science. And the 22-year-old has become even less reliable now that he’s 82.”

Dyson never earned a Ph.D., but in addition to his 18 honorary degrees he has received numerous awards, ranging from the National Book Critics Circle Award for his 1984 book, “Weapons and Hope,” about the nuclear threat, to the 2000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Among his six children are digital age guru Esther Dyson and science historian George Dyson.

To read “A Many-Colored Glass” is to get a sense of the wonder and awe that continue to drive our successes and failures at understanding the world around us. While Dyson continues to write prolifically, if you ask him what he’s up to, he’s apt to refer to his work as “scribbling equations on paper.” In conversation, Dyson is studied and frank, unafraid of one-word responses — all the better, it seems, to spirit him along to a question he might like better.