Word: dyson
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...Disturbing the Universe is a fair indication, Dyson spent the first twenty pages of his life as a child, the next eighty as a pure scientist, and the bulk of it, the final 150, as an ill-defined political spokesman, a defender of this and a believer in that. For the middle eighty pages the book soars. This is where we find what we came for: a candid description of the remarkable collaboration between Dyson's mathematical genius and his imagination, or the even more remarkable collaboration of his gifts with the complementary ones of those around...
...SOON he shifts to a more familiar realm--the political applications of science. To his credit, Dyson shies away from no controversial issue: England's strategies during World War II, nuclear warheads, the possibility of biological warfare. In each case, Dyson gives his exacting rationale for the stances he has adopted. His conclusions are always responsible, often noble, and occasionally naive. For instance, he ascribes our failure to develop safe nuclear reactors to contemporary scientists' inability to have fun inventing them. And as a solution to the energy crisis, he proposes that we somehow clone trees to yield gasoline...
...such acknowledged brilliance lead his professional life thus--first working with atomic energy, then space missions; now testifying before the Supreme Court, now tutoring the Princeton prodigy who independently discovered the atomic bomb? Because, it seems, he gave up on himself as a pure theoretical physicist. "I was," writes Dyson, "and always have remained, a problem solver rather than a creator of ideas. I can not, as Bohr and Feynmann did, sit for years with my mind concentrated on one deep question...
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...