Freeman Dyson

Professor Emeritus of Physics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

In Praise of Diversity

Dyson writes that ‘the first series will be about science and exploration, about our efforts to understand the nature of life and its place in the universe. The second series will be about technology and ethics, about the local problems introduced by our species into the existence of life on this planet’. He continues, ‘diversity is a great gift which life has brought to our planet and may one day bring to the rest of the universe’. 

Biography

Freeman John Dyson was born on 15 December 1923 in Crowthorne, England. A theoretical physicist, he unified the three versions of quantum electrodynamics. Assigned to the RAF Bomber Command during the Second World War, he returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, studying mathematics. As Commonwealth Fellow, Dyson joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Cornell in 1947. He returned to the UK as Research Fellow at Birmingham in 1949. Appointed Professor of Physics at Cornell in 1951, Oppenheimer secured him a lifetime appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. 

Member of the design team for TRIGA, he also worked for the Institute for Energy Analysis and joined the board of the Solar Electric Light Fund. In 2003, he was President of the Space Studies Institute, and he regularly contributed to The New York Review of Books. Notable works include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Imagined Worlds (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Origins of Life (1986), The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999), Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957–1965 (2002), and Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters (2018). 

Published/Archival Resources