Darren
Anderson, SELF project manager, and a group of students from the
village of Bessassi in northern Benin celebrate the installation of
solar systems that will provide electricity to their school.
The Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) is a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit whose mission is to design and implement solar energy solutions to assist those living in energy poverty
with their economic, educational, health care, and agricultural
development. Since 1990, SELF has completed projects in more than 20
countries, using solar energy to power drip irrigation in Benin, health care in Haiti, telemedicine in the Amazon rainforest, online learning in South Africa, and microenterprise development in Nigeria.
Executive Director:
Robert Freling Board of Directors: Freeman J. Dyson Roger Enrico
Robert A. Freling Larry Hagman (In Memoriam)
Jonathan W. Postal
Jonathan Silver
Mary Green Swig
Steven L. Swig
SELF believes that energy access is essential to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
SELF's Whole Village Development Model takes an integrated approach to
community empowerment by using a mix of solar energy solutions to
improve the lives of the 1.5 billion people who don't have access to
electricity around the world. By working closely with communities and
adhering to its principles of SELF Determination, SELF Help and SELF
Reliance, it seeks to provide benefits in:
Education: powering lights, computers and wireless internet services.
Water & Agriculture: powering water wells and pumps for clean drinking water and year-round crop irrigation.
Enterprise: powering centers for small businesses and providing electricity for machinery and equipment.
Community: electrifying homes, community centers and street lighting.
History
Foundation
SELF was founded in 1990 by Neville Williams, an award-winning journalist and author (Chasing the Sun: Solar Adventures Around the World), who had experience actively promoting solar power as a staffer with the U.S. Department of Energy during the Carter administration.
For much of the 1990s, SELF's primary mission was to deliver solar
home systems – 50-watt units installed at the household level that could
generate enough power to run a few compact fluorescent lights, a radio,
and a small black and white television for four or five hours each
evening.
The electricity generated by the solar panel is stored in a battery,
which then provides power at night and during rainy weather.
In its early projects, SELF used funds donated by private philanthropies to buy home-size photovoltaic systems
in bulk on the open market, usually enough for one small village at a
time. SELF then sold the systems to villagers in developing areas, in
partnership, where possible, with in-country nonprofit agencies. Each
participating household made a 20 percent down payment on a solar energy
system and paid off the balance – usually between $300 and $400 – over
several years. The buyers'payments were pooled in a local revolving loan
fund from which their neighbors could borrow to buy their own solar
power gear. SELF used a portion of the proceeds on the equipment to
establish a local dealership and train residents as solar installers and
technicians. The revolving loan funds made it possible for villagers to
finance the continued dissemination of solar systems in their areas.
Focusing on the Home & Creating SELCO
Over time, SELF began to evolve more elaborate project structures. In a joint venture with local partners in India, SELF formed a for-profit subsidiary using India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy to tap World Bank
funds set aside specifically for photovoltaic installations. In part,
the company used the money to finance rural co-ops' bulk purchase of
solar-energy systems for their members, to install the systems, and to
train local technicians. The company then repaid the World Bank's loan
from funds collected from the co-ops.
In 1997, SELF decided to launch a for-profit affiliate, the Solar Electric Light Company, or SELCO, based in Bangalore, India, whose goal would be to sell solar home systems in the states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
Neville Williams stepped down from his role with SELF to run SELCO, and
SELF's board of directors appointed Robert A. Freling as the new
executive director. Since 1995, SELCO has sold, serviced, and financed over 115,000 solar systems.
Expanding Services
Beginning
in 2000, SELF embarked on its next generation of projects that would
seek to harness solar energy for things such as advancing water pumping
and purification, purveying electrification to rural schools and health
clinics, providing power to small businesses and micro-enterprises, and
facilitating communication access.
The first opportunity to fulfill this expanded vision was found in South Africa, where SELF had been working on a project to install solar home systems in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal.
SELF installed a 1.5-kilowatt solar array, which generated enough
electricity to power approximately 20 PCs donated by Dell Computers and a
small satellite dish that delivered Internet access to Myeka High
School. This was the first solar-powered computer lab built in South
Africa, and the pass rate at Myeka High School jumped from 30 percent to
70 percent within a year and a half of installation.
Whole Village Development Model
In 2003, SELF found the opportunity to implement a "Whole-Village" approach when the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) invited SELF to carry out a solar electrification project in Nigeria. With support from the DOE, SELF equipped three villages in Jigawa State,
in northern Nigeria, with solar power systems for a community
water-pumping system, a health clinic, a primary school, street
lighting, a portable irrigation pump, and a micro-enterprise center. Since then, SELF has continued to implement this model in other project countries.
In partnership with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics
(ICRISAT) and Association pour le Developpement Economique Social et
Culturel de Kalalé (ADESCA), SELF has installed a total of eleven of its
Solar Market Gardens™ (SMG), an innovative, unique solar-powered drip
irrigation system, for women farming collectives in Dunkassa and Bessassi, two villages in the arid, northern part of the country.
A two-year study conducted by Stanford University's Program on Food Security and the Environment department appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
found that SELF's SMGs, "significantly augments both household income
and nutritional intake, particularly during the dry season, and is cost
effective compared to alternative technologies."
In addition to the SMGs, SELF has also installed three community
water wells, streetlights, and solar systems to power two schools and a
health center. In 2014, SELF finished the installation of a solar
micro-grid that will power a micro-enterprise center in Bessassi, and
construction of a second micro-enterprise center in Dunkassa is nearing
completion. SELF's future plans include replicating the potable water
pumping stations in two more villages, assessing the potential for
vaccine refrigerators at solar-electrified clinics, preparing for a
pilot internet café, and planning a solar home lantern program.
After the 2010 earthquake, SELF and Partners In Health teamed to develop the Rebuilding Haiti Initiative to fully power eight health centers. SELF has also installed 100 solar powered streetlights in tent camps to increase safety, and in collaboration with NRG Energy, Inc. and the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, SELF has completed the Sun Lights the Way: Brightening Boucan-Carré project by installing solar systems to power a fish farm, 20 schools, a Solar Market Garden™, and a microenterprise center.
The success of this project has increased the quality of education for
students in remote areas and has contributed to ensuring year-round food
security.
In 2013, SELF solarized an additional seven schools to serve
nearly 2,000 students, and also installed 20 solar-powered streetlights
around Boucan-Carré in dangerous areas. Currently, SELF is installing
two solar micro-grids that will provide electricity to 15,000 people in Port-à-Piment, Côteaux, Roche-à-Bateaux, and Fe-Yo-Bien, to be completed in 2015.
With support from Acción Social (a governmental agency in Colombia) and Microsoft, SELF conducted a week-long site assessment and determined that deploying solar electric systems for the indigenous Arhuaco, Kogi and Wiwa communities in the Sierra Nevada
mountains of northern Colombia is feasible. The project, a part of the
Cordon Ambiental y Tradicional de la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta
initiative led by Acción Social, is intended to power the health and
educational facilities in the villages, along with community lighting
systems at select locations.
SELF was selected as a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
for groundbreaking research in solar powered direct-drive freezers to
support global health and development. To support immunization efforts
at two remote village health posts in the mountains of Colombia's Sierra
Nevada de Santa Marta, SELF successfully field-tested three solar
powered direct-drive vaccine refrigerators and the first commercially
available direct-drive, battery-free vaccine icepack freezer. Following the tests, the fridge and freezer were donated to the village of Sabana Crespo.
SELF is also working on plans to install a solar energy based
microgrid in the village of Sabana Crespo to power coffee facilities,
the village general store, a health care clinic which includes a new
laboratory, and the village's school and cafeteria.
Dyson believed global warming is caused merely (also signed the World Climate Declaration that there is no Climate Emergency; https://clintel.org/world-climate-declaration/) by increased carbon dioxide
but that some of the effects of this are favourable and not taken into
account by climate scientists, such as increased agricultural yield. He
was skeptical about the simulation models used to predict climate change,
arguing that political efforts to reduce causes of climate change
distract from other global problems that should take priority.
Biography
Early life
Born on 15 December 1923, at Crowthorne in Berkshire, England, Dyson was the son of Mildred Lucy (Atkey) and George Dyson.
His father, a prominent composer, was later knighted. His mother had a
law degree, and after Dyson was born she worked as a social worker.
Dyson had one sibling, his older sister, Alice, who remembered him as a
boy surrounded by encyclopedias and always calculating on sheets of
paper. At the age of four he tried to calculate the number of atoms in the Sun. As a child, he showed an interest in large numbers and in the solar system, and was strongly influenced by the book Men of Mathematics by Eric Temple Bell. Politically, Dyson says he was "brought up as a socialist".
From 1936 to 1941 Dyson was a scholar at Winchester College, where his father was Director of Music. At age 17 he studied mathematics with G. H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge (where he won a scholarship at age 15), and at age 19 was assigned to war work in the Operational Research Section (ORS) of the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command, where he developed analytical methods for calculating the ideal density for bomber formations to help the Royal Air Force bomb German targets during World War II. After the war, Dyson was readmitted to Trinity College, where he obtained a BA degree in mathematics. From 1946 to 1949 he was a fellow of his college, occupying rooms just below those of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who resigned his professorship in 1947.
In 1947 Dyson published two papers in number theory.
Friends and colleagues described him as shy and self-effacing, with a
contrarian streak that his friends find refreshing but his intellectual
opponents find exasperating. "I have the sense that when consensus is
forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at
the ice", Steven Weinberg said of him. His friend the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks
said: "A favourite word of Freeman's about doing science and being
creative is the word 'subversive'. He feels it's rather important not
only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive, and he's done that all
his life."
Career in the United States
On G. I. Taylor's advice and recommendation, Dyson moved to the United States in 1947 as a Commonwealth Fellow to earn a physics doctorate with Hans Bethe at Cornell University (1947–1948). There he made the acquaintance of Richard Feynman.
The budding English physicist recognized the brilliance of the
flamboyant American and worked with him. He then moved to the Institute
for Advanced Study (1948–1949), before returning to England (1949–51),
where he was a research fellow at the University of Birmingham.
In 1949, Dyson demonstrated the equivalence of two formulations of quantum electrodynamics (QED): Richard Feynman's diagrams and the operator method developed by Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga. He was the first person after their creator to appreciate the power of Feynman diagrams
and his paper written in 1948 and published in 1949 was the first to
make use of them. He said in that paper that Feynman diagrams were not
just a computational tool but a physical theory and developed rules for
the diagrams that completely solved the renormalization
problem. Dyson's paper and also his lectures presented Feynman's
theories of QED in a form that other physicists could understand,
facilitating the physics community's acceptance of Feynman's work. J. Robert Oppenheimer,
in particular, was persuaded by Dyson that Feynman's new theory was as
valid as Schwinger's and Tomonaga's. Also in 1949, in related work,
Dyson invented the Dyson series. It was this paper that inspired John Ward to derive his celebrated Ward–Takahashi identity.
Dyson joined the faculty at Cornell as a physics professor in
1951, though he still had no doctorate. In December 1952 Oppenheimer,
the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, offered Dyson a lifetime appointment at the Institute, "for proving me wrong", in Oppenheimer's words. Dyson remained at the Institute until the end of his career. In 1957 he became a US citizen.
In 1958 Dyson was a member of the design team under Edward Teller for TRIGA, a small, inherently safe nuclear reactor used throughout the world in hospitals and universities for the production of medical isotopes.
A seminal paper by Dyson came in 1966, when, together with Andrew Lenard and independently of Elliott H. Lieb and Walter Thirring, he proved rigorously that the Pauli exclusion principle plays the main role in the stability of bulk matter.
Hence it is not the electromagnetic repulsion between outer-shell
orbital electrons that prevents two stacked wood blocks from coalescing
into a single piece, but the exclusion principle applied to electrons
and protons that generates the classical macroscopic normal force. In condensed matter physics, Dyson also analysed the phase transition of the Ising model in one dimension and spin waves.
Around 1979 Dyson worked with the Institute for Energy Analysis on climate studies. This group, under Alvin Weinberg's
direction, pioneered multidisciplinary climate studies, including a
strong biology group. Also during the 1970s, Dyson worked on climate
studies conducted by the JASON defense advisory group.
Dyson retired from the Institute for Advanced Study in 1994. In 1998 he joined the board of the Solar Electric Light Fund. As of 2003 he was president of the Space Studies Institute, the space research organization founded by Gerard K. O'Neill; as of 2013 he was on its board of trustees. Dyson was a longtime member of the JASON group.
Dyson won numerous scientific awards, but never a Nobel Prize. Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg said that the Nobel committee
"fleeced" Dyson, but Dyson remarked in 2009, "I think it's almost true
without exception if you want to win a Nobel Prize, you should have a
long attention span, get hold of some deep and important problem and
stay with it for ten years. That wasn't my style." Dyson was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and published a memoir, Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters in 2018.
With his first wife, the Swiss mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, Dyson had two children, Esther and George. In 1958, he married Imme Jung (born 1936), a masters runner, and they had four more children, Dorothy, Mia, Rebecca, and Emily Dyson.
Dyson's eldest daughter, Esther, is a digital technology
consultant and investor; she has been called "the most influential woman
in all the computer world". His son George is a historian of science, one of whose books is Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957–1965.
Death
Dyson died at a hospital near Princeton, New Jersey, on 28 February 2020 at age 96 from complications following a fall.
Concepts
Biotechnology and genetic engineering
Dyson admitted his record as a prophet was mixed, but thought it is
better to be wrong than vague, and that in meeting the world's material
needs, technology must be beautiful and cheap.
My book The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet
(1999) describes a vision of green technology enriching villages all
over the world and halting the migration from villages to megacities.
The three components of the vision are all essential: the sun to provide
energy where it is needed, the genome to provide plants that can
convert sunlight into chemical fuels cheaply and efficiently, the
Internet to end the intellectual and economic isolation of rural
populations. With all three components in place, every village in Africa
could enjoy its fair share of the blessings of civilization.
Dyson coined the term "green technologies", based on biology instead of physics or chemistry, to describe new species of microorganisms and plants designed to meet human needs. He argued that such technologies would be based on solar power rather than the fossil fuels whose use he saw as part of what he calls "gray technologies" of industry. He believed that genetically engineered crops, which he described as green, can help end rural poverty, with a movement based in ethics to end the inequitable distribution of wealth on the planet.
The Origin of Life
Dyson favored the dual origin theory: that life first formed as cells, then enzymes, and finally, much later, genes. This was first propounded by the Russian Alexander Oparin. J. B. S. Haldane developed the same theory independently.
In Dyson's version of the theory life evolved in two stages, widely
separated in time. Because of the biochemistry he regards it as too
unlikely that genes could have developed fully blown in one process.
Current cells contain adenosine triphosphate or ATP and adenosine 5'-monophosphate
or AMP, which greatly resemble each other but have completely different
functions. ATP transports energy around the cell, and AMP is part of
RNA and the genetic apparatus. Dyson proposed that in a primitive early
cell containing ATP and AMP, RNA and replication came into existence
only because of the similarity between AMP and RNA. He suggested that
AMP was produced when ATP molecules lost two of their phosphate
radicals, and then one cell somewhere performed Eigen's experiment and produced RNA.
There is no direct evidence for the dual origin theory, because
once genes developed, they took over, obliterating all traces of the
earlier forms of life. In the first origin, the cells were probably just
drops of water held together by surface tension, teeming with enzymes
and chemical reactions, and having a primitive kind of growth or
replication. When the liquid drop became too big, it split into two
drops. Many complex molecules formed in these "little city economies"
and the probability that genes would eventually develop in them was much
greater than in the prebiotic environment.
Artist's concept of Dyson rings, forming a stable Dyson swarm, or "Dyson sphere"
Dyson sphere
In 1960 Dyson wrote a short paper for the journal Science titled "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation". In it he speculated that a technologically advanced extraterrestrialcivilization
might surround its native star with artificial structures to maximize
the capture of the star's energy. Eventually the civilization would
enclose the star, intercepting electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths from visible light downward and radiating waste heat outward as infrared radiation. One method of searching for extraterrestrial civilizations would be to look for large objects radiating in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
One should
expect that, within a few thousand years of its entering the stage of
industrial development, any intelligent species should be found
occupying an artificial biosphere which surrounds its parent star.
Dyson conceived that such structures would be clouds of asteroid-sized space habitats, though science fiction writers have preferred a solid structure: either way, such an artifact is often called a Dyson sphere,
although Dyson used the term "shell". Dyson said that he used the term
"artificial biosphere" in the article to mean a habitat, not a shape. The general concept of such an energy-transferring shell had been advanced decades earlier by author Olaf Stapledon in his 1937 novel Star Maker, a source Dyson credited publicly.
Dyson tree
Dyson also proposed the creation of a Dyson tree, a genetically engineered plant capable of growing on a comet.
He suggested that comets could be engineered to contain hollow spaces
filled with a breathable atmosphere, thus providing self-sustaining
habitats for humanity in the outer Solar System.
Plants
could grow greenhouses ... just as turtles grow shells and polar bears
grow fur and polyps build coral reefs in tropical seas. These plants
could keep warm by the light from a distant Sun and conserve the oxygen
that they produce by photosynthesis. The greenhouse would consist of a
thick skin providing thermal insulation, with small transparent windows
to admit sunlight. Outside the skin would be an array of simple lenses,
focusing sunlight through the windows into the interior ... Groups of
greenhouses could grow together to form extended habitats for other
species of plants and animals.
Space colonies
I've done some historical research on the costs of the Mayflower's
voyage, and on the Mormons' emigration to Utah, and I think it's
possible to go into space on a much smaller scale. A cost on the order
of $40,000 per person [1978 dollars, $143,254 in 2013 dollars] would be
the target to shoot for; in terms of real wages, that would make it
comparable to the colonization of America. Unless it's brought down to
that level it's not really interesting to me, because otherwise it would
be a luxury that only governments could afford.
Dyson was interested in space travel since he was a child, reading such science fiction classics as Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker. As a young man, he worked for General Atomics on the nuclear-powered Orion
spacecraft. He hoped Project Orion would put men on Mars by 1965,
Saturn by 1970. For a quarter-century Dyson was unhappy about how the
government conducts space travel:
The problem
is, of course, that they can't afford to fail. The rules of the game
are that you don't take a chance, because if you fail, then probably
your whole program gets wiped out.
Dyson still hoped for cheap space travel, but was resigned to waiting
for private entrepreneurs to develop something new and inexpensive.
No law of
physics or biology forbids cheap travel and settlement all over the
solar system and beyond. But it is impossible to predict how long this
will take. Predictions of the dates of future achievements are
notoriously fallible. My guess is that the era of cheap unmanned
missions will be the next fifty years, and the era of cheap manned
missions will start sometime late in the twenty-first century.
Any affordable program of manned exploration must be centered in
biology, and its time frame tied to the time frame of biotechnology; a
hundred years, roughly the time it will take us to learn to grow
warm-blooded plants, is probably reasonable.
Space exploration
A direct search for life in Europa's ocean would today be prohibitively
expensive. Impacts on Europa give us an easier way to look for evidence
of life there. Every time a major impact occurs on Europa, a vast
quantity of water is splashed from the ocean into the space around
Jupiter. Some of the water evaporates, and some condenses into snow.
Creatures living in the water far enough from the impact have a chance
of being splashed intact into space and quickly freeze-dried. Therefore,
an easy way to look for evidence of life in Europa's ocean is to look
for freeze-dried fish in the ring of space debris orbiting Jupiter.
Freeze-dried fish orbiting Jupiter is a fanciful notion, but nature in
the biological realm has a tendency to be fanciful. Nature is usually
more imaginative than we are. ... To have the best chance of success, we
should keep our eyes open for all possibilities.
Dyson's eternal intelligence
Dyson proposed that an immortal group of intelligent beings could escape the prospect of heat death by extending time to infinity while expending only a finite amount of energy. This is also known as the Dyson scenario.
Dyson's transform
His concept "Dyson's transform" led to one of the most important lemmas of Olivier Ramaré's theorem: that every even integer can be written as a sum of no more than six primes.
Dyson and Hugh Montgomery discovered an intriguing connection between quantum physics and Montgomery's pair correlation conjecture about the zeros of the Zeta function. The primes 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, ... are described by the Riemann Zeta function, and Dyson had previously developed a description of quantum physics based on m by m arrays of totally random numbers. Montgomery and Dyson discovered that the eigenvalues
of these matrices are spaced apart in exactly the same manner as
Montgomery conjectured for the nontrivial zeros of the Zeta function. Andrew Odlyzko has verified the conjecture on a computer, using his Odlyzko–Schönhage algorithm to calculate many zeros.
There are in nature one, two, and three dimensional quasicrystals. Mathematicians define a quasicrystal as a set of discrete points whose Fourier transform
is also a set of discrete points. Odlyzko has done extensive
computations of the Fourier transform of the nontrivial zeros of the
Zeta function, and they seem to form a one-dimensional quasicrystal.
This would in fact follow from the Riemann hypothesis.
In number theory, the crank of a partition is a certain integer associated with the partition in number theory. Dyson first introduced the term without a definition in a 1944 paper in a journal published by the Mathematics Society of Cambridge University. He then gave a list of properties this yet-to-be-defined quantity should have. In 1988, George E. Andrews and Frank Garvan discovered a definition for the crank satisfying the properties Dyson had hypothesized.
Astrochicken
Astrochicken is the name given to a thought experiment Dyson expounded in his book Disturbing the Universe (1979). He contemplated how humanity could build a small, self-replicating automaton that could explore space more efficiently than a manned craft could. He attributed the general idea to John von Neumann, based on a lecture von Neumann gave in 1948 titled The General and Logical Theory of Automata. Dyson expanded on von Neumann's automata theories and added a biological component.
Projects Dyson collaborated on
Lumpers and splitters
John von Neumann
Dyson suggested that philosophers can be broadly, if simplistically,
divided into lumpers and splitters. These roughly correspond to Platonists, who regard the world as made up of ideas, and materialists, who imagine it divided into atoms.
Views
Climate change
Dyson agreed that anthropogenicglobal warming exists and that one of its main causes is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. He said that in many ways increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is beneficial, and that it is increasing biological growth, agricultural yields and forests. He believed that existing simulation models of climate change
fail to account for some important factors, and that the results thus
contain too great a margin of error to reliably predict future trends.
Dyson's views on global warming were criticized. Climate scientist James Hansen
said that Dyson "doesn't know what he's talking about ... If he's going
to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other
life on the planet, then he should first do his homework – which he
obviously has not done on global warming."
Dyson replied that "[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda
are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know
much, but it's rather against the way those people behave and the kind
of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have."
In 2008 Dyson endorsed the now common usage of "global warming" as synonymous with global anthropogenic climate change,
but argued that political efforts to reduce the causes of climate
change distract from other global problems that should take priority.
Since originally taking interest in climate studies in the 1970s, Dyson suggested that carbon dioxide
levels in the atmosphere could be controlled by planting fast-growing
trees. He calculated that it would take a trillion trees to remove all
carbon from the atmosphere.
In a 2014 interview he said, "What I'm convinced of is that we don't
understand climate ... It will take a lot of very hard work before that
question is settled."
At the British Bomber Command, Dyson and colleagues proposed removing two gun turrets from the RAF Lancaster bombers, to cut the catastrophic losses due to German fighters in the Battle of Berlin. A Lancaster without turrets could fly 50 mph (80 km/h) faster and be much more maneuverable.
All our
advice to the commander in chief [went] through the chief of our
section, who was a career civil servant. His guiding principle was to
tell the commander in chief things that the commander in chief liked to
hear ... To push the idea of ripping out gun turrets, against the
official mythology of the gallant gunner defending his crew mates ...
was not the kind of suggestion the commander in chief liked to hear.
I agreed emphatically with Henry Stimson.
Once we had got ourselves into the business of bombing cities, we might
as well do the job competently and get it over with. I felt better that
morning than I had felt for years ... Those fellows who had built the
atomic bombs obviously knew their stuff ... Later, much later, I would
remember [the downside].
I am
convinced that to avoid nuclear war it is not sufficient to be afraid of
it. It is necessary to be afraid, but it is equally necessary to
understand. And the first step in understanding is to recognize that the
problem of nuclear war is basically not technical but human and
historical. If we are to avoid destruction we must first of all
understand the human and historical context out of which destruction
arises.
In 1967, in his capacity as a military adviser, Dyson wrote an
influential paper on the issue of possible US use of tactical nuclear
weapons in the Vietnam War.
When a general said in a meeting, "I think it might be a good idea to
throw in a nuke now and then, just to keep the other side guessing ..."
Dyson became alarmed and obtained permission to write a report on the
pros and cons of using such weapons from a purely military point of
view. (This report, Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia, published by the Institute for Defense Analyses, was obtained, with some redactions, by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability under the Freedom of Information act in 2002.)
It was sufficiently objective that both sides in the debate based their
arguments on it. Dyson says that the report showed that, even from a
narrow military point of view, the US was better off not using nuclear
weapons.
Dyson was raised in what he described as a "watered-down Church of England Christianity". He was a nondenominational Christian and attended various churches, from Presbyterian to Roman Catholic. Regarding doctrinal or Christological issues, he said, "I am neither a saint nor a theologian. To me, good works are more important than theology."
Science and
religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand
the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two
windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe.
Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential
features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.
Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal
jurisdiction, when either religious or scientific dogma claims to be
infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are
equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both
science and religion into disrepute. The media exaggerate their numbers
and importance. The media rarely mention the fact that the great
majority of religious people belong to moderate denominations that treat
science with respect, or the fact that the great majority of scientists
treat religion with respect so long as religion does not claim
jurisdiction over scientific questions.
Dyson partially disagreed with the famous remark by his fellow physicist Steven Weinberg
that "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad
people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes
religion."
Weinberg's
statement is true as far as it goes, but it is not the whole truth. To
make it the whole truth, we must add an additional clause: "And for bad
people to do good things – that [also] takes religion." The main point
of Christianity is that it is a religion for sinners. Jesus made that
very clear. When the Pharisees asked his disciples, "Why eateth your
Master with publicans and sinners?" he said, "I come to call not the
righteous but sinners to repentance." Only a small fraction of sinners
repent and do good things but only a small fraction of good people are
led by their religion to do bad things.
While Dyson called himself a Christian, he identified himself as agnostic about some of the specifics of his faith. For example, in reviewing The God of Hope and the End of the World by John Polkinghorne, Dyson wrote:
I am myself
a Christian, a member of a community that preserves an ancient heritage
of great literature and great music, provides help and counsel to young
and old when they are in trouble, educates children in moral
responsibility, and worships God in its own fashion. But I find
Polkinghorne's theology altogether too narrow for my taste. I have no
use for a theology that claims to know the answers to deep questions but
bases its arguments on the beliefs of a single tribe. I am a practicing
Christian but not a believing Christian. To me, to worship God means to
recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our
universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension.
In The God Delusion (2006), atheist activist Richard Dawkins singled out Dyson for accepting the Templeton Prize in 2000: "It would be taken as an endorsement of religion by one of the world's most distinguished physicists." In 2000, Dyson declared that he was a (non-denominational) Christian, and he disagreed with Dawkins on several occasions, as when he criticized Dawkins' understanding of evolution.
Dyson published a number of collections of speculations and
observations about technology, science, and the future. In 1996, he was
awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science.
In 2000, Dyson was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
In 2003, Dyson was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado.
In 2011, Dyson received as one of twenty distinguished Old Wykehamists at the Ad Portas celebration, the highest honor that Winchester College bestows.
Advanced Quantum Mechanics, World Scientific, 2007, ISBN978-981-270-661-4. Freely available at: arXiv:quant-ph/0608140. (Dyson's 1951 Cornell lecture notes transcribed by David Derbes)
A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe, University of Virginia Press, 2007. Review
Birds and Frogs: Selected Papers, 1990–2014, World Scientific Publishing Company, 2015.
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