Bearing a piece of Feynman's mantle

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, collections, science, philosophy, rereadable

Freeman Dyson blows me away. Many have heard of a Dyson Sphere, based on a statement of his in 1960, that a technological culture a few thousand years old can be expected to expand its ecosphere so as to completely surround the parent star and capture all of its radiant energy; he proposed looking for infrared stars with peak energy near 10 microns, the heat-leaked signature of such envelopes. But how many have heard of the Dyson Tree? He proposes genetically modified trees to live on the surface of a comet; wood is strong enough to support a tree many kilometers "high" from the surface of a body a few kilometers in diameter. An appropriately seeded comet would become a fuzzy green globe the size of the moon, the trees sending oxygen and glucose to a human society living among the roots inside the comet.

A renowned physicist and mathematician, mentored by Richard Feynman, he leapt to fame when he published a demonstration that the theory-driven formulations of Julian Schwinger and Sin-Ichiro Tomonage were equivalent to the diagram-derived equations invented by Feynman. These three went on to receive the Nobel Prize in 1965 for these developments. (It'll take a bit more than the aforenamed synthesis for Dyson go gain the Prize).

Dyson's new book, The Scientist as Rebel is built around a collection of book reviews he did for the New York Review. However, beyond the title essay and four other pieces, the subject is not so much rebellion or revolution, but scientists themselves, and how the person shapes the work. In a great many cases, Dyson had at least met the author of book he reviews, and he frequently knew them well. Being very well read (I wonder when he has time to do physics?), he is able to draw on earlier works by an author and on similar works by others in evaluating a book or an idea.

A stellar example of this is a 1972 lecture-review-essay based on Desmond Bernal's book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. He dwells on Bernal's thesis at length, then discusses the prospect of scattering humankind among the comets—one of Bernal's suggestions for overcoming World—, introducing the concept of the Dyson tree, which seems to date from this lecture. In the process, he refers to other writers on the theme, including William Bradford, who described the Pilgrims' experience in On Plymoth Plantation, written beginning in 1630. Bradford's difficulties getting the enterprise funded and retaining the allegiance of the wavering pilgrims makes Bernal's case for him.

But Dyson has much to say about many things. He lauds the diligence of amateurs, reminding us of the limitations of "big science", particularly its narrow focus—of necessity due to the great cost of its tools. It takes a huge amount of very costly equipment, for example, to halfway keep up with thousands of comet-seeking amateur astronomers. Most of the valuable data on variable stars was gathered by members of AAVSO, the American Association of Variable Star Observers. (In my own field, Geology, for every bounty-hunting fossil freak, there are hundreds or thousands of rockhounds who honor and respect the rarity of great finds and bring scientists in to appropriately record and study them. Many are better field workers than the professors they work with, and become adjuncts-without-credential to honored institutions).

In addition to twenty-league trees, Freeman is full of ideas such as a descendant of CAD-CAM he calls CAS-CAR (computer aided selection/computer aided reproduction), for generating custom pets by genetic engineering. Blue kittens, anyone? The question isn't how or why, but only when. He is an early proponent of bypassing nanotech by instead engineering microbes to do our dirty work, taking care to make them cannibalistic so they clean up after themselves when they run out of "feedstock" (My own worry is that they'd mutate and become predatory instead, which is a similar theme to that in Michael Crichton's Prey, which Dyson reviews in chapter 4. We'd do well to remember "Life will find a way" from Jurassic Park).

Early in reading the book, I thought to list ideas and make this a point-by-point review, such as I often do for anthologies. It didn't take long to realize the list would be much too long. Like Feynman, Freeman Dyson is a polymath, master of a number of trades. Writing is one of them. Idea generation is another. An anthology of fiction typically has one strong idea per story. Dyson's writing has at least one idea per page...and this book has 350 pages. I'll just have to keep it around, and read it again every couple of years.