Word: oned
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Freeman Dyson's first book, Disturbing the Universe, has all the trappings of a commercial pounding: his famous name, sensational subject matter, characters from history books. But Dyson, who might have gotten away with a forgettable rehash, offers instead a captivating portrait of one of the formative minds of modern physics...
...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...
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...
This political arm-twisting has turned the EPA's regulatory efforts into, as one congressman put it, "a complete joke." Top agency officials have exempted from regulation more than half of all hazardous wastes--some tens of thousands of substances known to cause birth defects, mutations, radiation poisoning and infectious diseases. Branch chief Sanjour observes, "Whereas previously these wastes may have been disposed of inadequately and secretly, they can soon (thanks to a clean bill of health from EPA) be disposed of inadequately and openly." He concludes, "The actions taken by EPA are, quite simply, illegal...