Word: dyson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
James R. Killian Jr., retired president of M.I.T.: The five indispensable books are Darwin's Origin of Species, Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe, Ernst Mayr's Growth of Biological Thought, the works of Thomas Huxley, James Watson's Double Helix, René Vallery-Radot's Life of Pasteur, Eric Ashby's Technology and the Academics: An Essay on Universities and the Scientific Revolution and Sir WiLliam Cecil Dampier's History of Science. And the Bible. And Fowler's Modern English Usage. Also Spengler's Decline of the West, Henry Adams...
...Among those who expressed interest: Warner Communications Inc.; New York Real Estate Developer Donald Trump; American Stock Exchange Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr.; New York State Power Authority Chairman John Dyson...
...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...
...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...