Very sad to hear that Freeman Dyson has passed away at the age of 96. His contributions to quantum field theory were deep, and he was a truly original thinker. He was also completely wrong about climate change, and quite loudly too. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/science/freeman-dyson-dead.html … (1/n)
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So, let’s talk about Dyson. There’s going to be three parts to this thread. 1. Dyson’s contributions to science; 2. A personal story about Dyson; 3. Dyson’s climate denial, and why we need to talk about it.
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First, Dyson’s contributions to science. His most profound work was in quantum electrodynamics (QED), our best theory about the interaction of light and matter.
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In the late 1940s, Dyson showed that two different formulations of QED—one from Schwinger and Tomonaga, and another from Feynman—were equivalent, and made great use of the latter.
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After that, he worked in many different areas over his long career, too many to name. One of my favorites is Project Orion, a concept for a spaceship powered by nuclear bombs, which Dyson worked on in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
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The scale of his imagination was huge—he suggested aliens might build a megastructure enclosing an entire star to harness its energy. Dyson also proposed ways to look for these spheres. They were dubbed Dyson spheres, and they've been a sci-fi staple ever since.
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Interestingly, Dyson never actually got a PhD in physics. But nobody ever really cared. He was obviously brilliant. (That being said, even Dyson wouldn’t be able to get a permanent academic position today without the degree. Times have changed.)
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Another person who never got a PhD, and never needed one: Andrew Gleason, of Harvard, who contributed the final touches to the solution of one of Hilbert's problems.
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