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“... For believers in the ‘Two Cultures’, this writing by a scientist would be hard to classify. Freeman Dyson is a scientist of great distinction. He is best-known for his share in laying the foundations of quantum electrodynamics, the discipline which describes the interplay of charged particles, such as electrons, with each other and with ...”

“... Freeman Dyson warns us in Imagined Worlds that he is now ‘an old scientist pretending to be a sage’ and that ‘we learn from science and from history that the future is unpredictable.’ As well as diagnosing our present ills, however, Dyson offers strong hopes that our descendants will colonise not just their own galaxy in its entirety, but others too ...”

“... needs to try to understand the feelings as well as the official thoughts of their opponents. Freeman Dyson puts this point well, saying that we are sharply divided into those who feel like Warriors and those who feel like Victims. Each set has its own language and speaks mainly to its own members. Dyson, an ...”

“... be ugly, he argues, and hence (a step sure to raise many eyebrows) unlikely to be good physics. Freeman Dyson, he notes, has shown how life and thought might continue for ever in an endlessly expanding universe despite the constantly increasing cold, or rather because of it. Dyson explains that as temperatures fell ...”

“... When von Neumann died, the computer was dismantled. No one else quite knew what to do with it, and Freeman Dyson says: ‘The snobs at our institute could not tolerate having electrical engineers around them who sullied with their dirty hands the purity of our scholarly atmosphere.’ In Regis’s account von Neumann stands as the link with the ...”

“... of ice water, Feynman had visibly put his finger on the reason for the catastrophe. As his friend Freeman Dyson later remarked, ‘the public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.’ In a dissenting report, which witheringly ...”

“... orbiting solar panels first appeared in Olaf Stapledon’s novel Star Maker (1937), which inspired Freeman Dyson to develop the idea of the Dyson sphere, designed to capture as much of a star’s energy as possible. Alas, the behaviour of Boyajian’s Star turns out to be the result of dust in its solar ...”

“... see it continue,’ he said. ‘I don’t see anything wrong with topless dancing.’ He was, as Freeman Dyson put it, ‘all genius and all buffoon’. All that’s on the one hand. Lurking on the other hand, however, are a number of dangers for the biographer. Feynman devoted his life to physics: ‘Physics is my only hobby,’ he once said. ‘It is ...”

“... highly prescient in regard to the Hubble, was made several years ago in an essay by the physicist Freeman Dyson. Big science projects take so long to build, he noted, and the advance of technology is so quick, that by the time the big instrument is finished there are often cheaper and better ways to the same end. The nemesis of the Hubble telescope is ...”

“... public thrills, von Braun embodied a particular kind of Cold War moral journey. ‘In the end,’ Freeman Dyson wrote, ‘the amnesty given to him by the United States did far more than a strict accounting of his misdeeds could have done to redeem his soul and to fulfil his destiny.’ Destiny. A useful word in the age of the Moonshot. It was felt that ...”

“... their visual idiom was gibberish to other theoretical physicists – but, with the help of Freeman Dyson at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the diagrams soon became the lingua franca of QED physicists and their use was extended to several other sorts of physics. The diagrams have acquired iconographic status: Feynman decorated his ...”

“... War, but it is in his book rather than Neillands’s that one encounters the nuclear physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked with Bomber Harris and his officers as a young operations analyst at the time of the Hamburg raid. Dyson must have heard many of the justifications rehearsed by Neillands – that the bombing ...”