Variation and Diversity: A Tribute to Freeman Dyson
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Variation and Diversity: A Tribute to Freeman Dyson John Staddon
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Theoretical Physics Freeman Dyson, who died this February at the age of ninety-six, was an extraordinary man. He was extraordinarily brilliant and extraordinarily lucky. His upper-middle class English family included a father who was a conductor and composer, and later knight of the realm, while his mother trained as a lawyer. Both were lovers of literature, Chaucer, and poetry. Educated at Winchester College, the most intellectual of the English “public” schools, he went on to Cambridge University at the age of fifteen and then to graduate school with Hans Bethe at Cornell in the U.S. where he had another great stroke of luck. He first read about and then encountered the authors of two apparently incongruent ideas about quantum electrodynamics (QED). The first was intricately mathematical, proposed by theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger; the second was intuitive and graphical, the product of another physicist, Richard Feynman.1 These two views seemed very different, though both gave the same answers to important physics questions. How could they be both different and right? Young Dyson spent ten days in late summer of 1948 in San Francisco and Berkeley “taking a holiday from physics,”2 then returned to a fellowship at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. In a boring Greyhound bus, traveling across Nebraska, the 25-year-old student mulled over these two disparate views. 1 Beautifully explained in Feynman’s little book QED: The strange theory of light and matter (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1985). 2
Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
John Staddon is a psychobiologist and James B. Duke Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University; [email protected]. He last appeared in these pages in summer, 2020 with his article “The Case for Carbon Dioxide.”
J. Staddon
He had a “eureka!” moment, seeing at once that they were saying the same thing in very different ways. When he arrived at Princeton, he gave a series of talks on his idea. At first, he was harshly criticized by Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Institute, who thought he was on the wrong track. By the end, though, Oppenheimer was won over, sending the young Dyson a note reading “Nolo contendere.” Dyson soon put together his unification paper: “The radiation theories of Tomonaga,3 Schwinger and Feynman,” which in 1953 got him the job of a lifetime, an appointment at the Institute. Like his colleague at the Institute, Albert Einstein, his duties were simply to participate in the intellectual life of the place and to think. He never finished his Ph.D. Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman shared the physics Nobel in 1965; Dyson was not included, three being the max. He did not regret his omission, saying “[i]t is much better to be asked why you did not get the prize than why you did.” Without great natural gifts, all Dyson’s luck would have been una
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