Freeman John Dyson
Freeman Dyson was a physicist and educator best known for his speculative work on extraterrestrial civilizations and for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering. He theorized several concepts that bear his name, such as Dyson's transform, Dyson tree, Dyson series, and Dyson sphere.
The son of a musician and composer, Dyson was educated at the University of Cambridge. As a teenager he developed a passion for mathematics, but his studies at Cambridge were interrupted in 1943, when he served in the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. He received a B.A. from Cambridge in 1945 and became a research fellow of Trinity College. In 1947 he went to the United States to study physics and spent the next two years at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., and Princeton, where he studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer, then director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Dyson returned to England in 1949 to become a research fellow at the University of Birmingham, but he was appointed professor of physics at Cornell in 1951 and two years later at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he became professor emeritus in 2000. He became a U.S. citizen in 1957.
“It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to beapproached without some humor and some bewilderment.”
“We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!”
“The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.”
“Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.”
“The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires.”
“The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.”