Word: dyson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LAST SECTION of Disturbing the Universe unveils Dyson's far-reaching ideas for the future. "I am obsessed with the future," he writes, and then offers the imaginative products of this obsession: clades and clones, interstellar colonizations and "thought experiments." There is even a little theoretical physics. But this is the weakest part of the book. It is more science fiction than science...
This portion of the book accounts for the most puzzling disproportion in Disturbing the Universe. Freeman Dyson is a proven scientific commodity. Robert Oppenheimer hailed his successful synthesis of two seemingly irreconcilable but equally correct theories of the electron as one of the century's breakthroughs. Now the Alfred P. Sloan foundation has asked him to contribute his bit to "the public understanding of the scientific enterprise...
...what Dyson has written reads at times more like a confession. In Disturbing the Universe, science is often secondary to Dyson's enunciation of his personal failures and vulnerabilities. This is the most unexpected and endearing aspect of this unorthodox book. But while Dyson is eloquent, he is not a professional writer when he picks up a pen and bravely sets down what means most to him, he is not always convincing...
...Dyson carries on a crusade against the English and then the American bureaucracy throughout the book. His preoccupation with this issue was born of his work as a researcher for the English government during World War II. His criticism extends to the American bungling of arms control. Dyson argues that the United States should have abandoned offensive-weapon research in favor of defensive-weapon research. He expresses admiration for Richard Nixon's unilateral decision that the United States should abandon the use of biological weapons...
Behind this action lay his scientific hero--Matthew Meselson, who inspired Nixon's move. And it is for him that Dyson reserves his greatest praise. "Seldom in history has one man, armed only with the voice of reason, won so complete a victory," he says. And Meselson is not the only of Dyson's heroes. There's Frank Thompason, the idealistic poet, who went down in action in Yugoslavia, a political hero fighting for a noble cause; there is the humble black woman who served with Dyson on a committee to decide if DNA research was to be allowed...