The Scientist as Rebel
and
A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe

Freeman Dyson

reeman J. Dyson sees himself as a heretic: a successor to the line of courageous scientists like Galileo and Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600 for expressing doubts about Christianity and Christian cosmology. Dyson's goal in publishing these two overlapping collections of articles, public lectures, and book reviews is to inspire young people to find the strength of mind to question the received wisdom of the day, no matter what its source. Though we are no longer in danger of being burned at the stake, those who say what they believe may still lose their jobs or, in Europe and Canada, be fined or imprisoned if what they say goes against the prevailing orthodoxy.

In his boundless optimism, his equally boundless enthusiasm for science, and his at times astonishing naivete, Dyson resembles the late Carl Sagan. But Dyson, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, is no lightweight. Though personally humble, he has made fundamental contributions to quantum physics and mathematics. His scientific status and his pacifist views have made him a darling of left-wing opinion outlets like The New York Times. But in these books, Dyson demonstrates that his ability to think critically and skeptically and his commitment to the truth outweigh his politics.

There is one sure test of whether an author is really as anti-establishment as he claims: If Publishers Weekly gives the book a glowing review, you may be certain the author espouses establishmentarian views: big government, punitive taxation, and nuclear disarmament. If the book is a "disappointment", you know that the book punches holes in liberal ideology. But Freeman Dyson is not so easy to pigeonhole. Publishers Weekly adored The Scientist as Rebel, in which Dyson portrays himself as the typically naive tie-dyed '60s pacifist, "rebelling" against industry and militarism and guns and nuclear power. But when Dyson rebelled in A Many-Colored Glass against the media establishment's sacred cows---their anxiety over global warming, their fear of biotechnology and genetically engineered foods, and their abject terror at the sight of Margaret Thatcher---his ideas were not so easy for the narrow-minded ideologues in the press to swallow. Dyson does not care. For him, science comes first.

The writing style in A Many-Colored Glass is a little simpler than in Rebel, as Dyson hopes to reach more young people. Some of the articles Rebel are duplicated in Glass, but with additional paragraphs. Glass has less of Dyson's earlier pacifism and more of his imagination. The bulk of Rebel consists of Dyson's book reviews, mostly of biographies of other scientists. People stuff.

Dyson divides scientists into "hedgehogs", who specialize in a single strategy, probing deeply into a single problem, and "foxes", who adapt their strategy as situation demands. Einstein, says Dyson, was a hedgehog who could not accept the theory of black holes and resisted quantum mechanics. Dyson sees himself as a fox. Even in his eighties, Dyson is open to new ideas. His powerful imagination sees the world as a spectacular explosion of irreducible phenomena. He hates reductionism, even as he admits it has been a powerful tool in science. Dyson's optimism about the future rivals that of Ray Kurtzweil. Yet his prediction of America's eventual decline is reminiscent of that most pessimistic of historians, Oswald Spengler.

So it is with all rebels: true rebels cannot be predicted or categorized, and they lead where people would not normally go. Suggesting things that accord with conventional wisdom, like nuclear disarmament, doesn't take courage. Everyone wants to eliminate nuclear weapons; but only a fool would advocate unilateral nuclear disarmament. The trick is to eliminate them without destabilizing the global balance of power and leaving us vulnerable to nuclear intimidation. That task must be left to the lowly "hedgehogs" like Albert Einstein and David Hilbert. Dyson's great strength, whether he realizes it or not, is his ability to find problems we didn't think of, and imagine outlandish and sometimes impractical solutions---like the famous Dyson sphere. He suggests that plants could be engineered to have leaves made of silicon to improve their efficiency, and that oysters could be engineered to extract gold from seawater and make golden pearls. Genetically-engineered hundred-mile high trees growing on comets. This is Dyson's trademark out-of-box "foxy" thinking. Yet for all the comparisons with vulpine carnivores, he recognizes that in the real world, fantastic ideas aren't enough. Someone must find a way to make them work. Bring on the hedgehogs!