One memorable life: Freeman Dyson, 1923-2020 The renowned physicist and polymath Freeman Dyson passed away near Princeton, N.J., on Feb. 28, at the age of 96. Why he matters: Dyson was a dazzling scientist, but his true genius lay in his astonishing imagination, which reached for the furthest edges of the cosmos. In 1949, Dyson tackled one of the trickiest problems in the field: how to describe the behavior of electrons and photons. Dyson's insight, which came to him while riding a Greyhound bus through Nebraska, proved key to quantum electrodynamics, which the physicist Richard Feynman called the "jewel of physics." Dyson never won a Nobel Prize for his work. He never even bothered to earn a PhD. Instead, he spent the rest of his career pursuing whatever caught his interest, migrating from atomic reactor design to nuclear bomb-powered space exploration to the mathematics of baseball. He achieved popular renown as a gifted scientific writer, publishing his final book in 2018 at the age of 95. A dedicated contrarian, later in his career he came under fire for doubting the danger of human-made climate change. The bottom line: Few scientists can be said to have played as important a role in the making of our present than Dyson — and even fewer could so brilliantly envision the future. https://www.axios.com/freeman-dyson-memorable-life-c34a78dd-d129-41ca-aec8-73f0a6609c52.html
In honour of this thread getting zero posts I bought a Dyson vacuum -- they're pretty expensive definitely not free man.
I don't think so. He's just way up in the ivory tower and people are like LOLWUT? Also, other than his occasional essay in the New York Review of Books, he had gotten fairly low profile, even as famous scientists go. I have some kind of bitter comments about one of those, LOL. Maybe I'll bore you via message with the details. But we might get more posts if we talked about the Dyson Sphere! Oh yeah!
The Grandest Rocket Ever The spaceships of Project Orion, designed in the late 1950s but never built, had in common their massive size (this one was more than 30 feet in diameter) and a propulsion system that relied on controlled nuclear explosions. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-grandest-rocket-ever
Man, I bought a Dyson a few years for 400.00 and was super proud of it. Had a friend come over, he saw it and bagged on me for how much I spent on a crap vacuum. He used to sell vacuums back in the day, so he knew. I felt small and ashamed that day.
A great Star Trek:The Next Generation scene and a good brief explanation of a Dyson Sphere. The Ringworld series by Larry Niven, which I've enjoyed, makes good use of it. There are several science fiction novels that make use of Dyson Spheres in one form or another. Freeman Dyson was quite remarkable. Is there a good biography of him?
Katherine Johnson passed away recently. There must be a mathematical proof behind this, something with threes.
“Polymath Freeman Dyson died.” “Poly what?” “Ugh...” “Oh the guy that made the first vacuum.” “Sure” “Hey everybody that old creepy white guy in those Dyson vacuum commercials died from the Corona virus!”
