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Freeman Dyson Has Died

nytimes.com

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Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died

#161

Post by hermitcrab »

astrophysician wrote: post #5

About 4 years ago, I was a grad student in astrophysics at Princeton. Dyson worked at the Institute for Advanced Study which, while not officially part of the university was essentially an extension of the various departments (shared colloquiums, any researcher there was a valid thesis adviser, etc.). The grad students have a tradition (or used to) called “Thunch” (Thursday Lunch) where they invite someone to come ha…

What a legend. I met him briefly at the "Festival of inappropriate technology" in the UK some years back. When I asked if project Orion (nuclear powered rockets) should have gone ahead he said (paraphrasing from memory): All big engineering projects killed people, but it probably wasn't worth the extra radiation in the atmosphere.

Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died

#162

Post by dr_dshiv »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #85

A few years ago, I asked Freeman Dyson what we should teach our children so there would be more Freeman Dyson's. He gave a surprising answer. He said we should teach children to genetically "play" with plants. He thought we needed that kind of creativity as a human species if we would ever be able to populate the asteroid belt. He said that most of the surface area of the solar system is in the asteroid belt -- but t…

The second part of this story is that he said he was inspired by the Little Prince. Specifically, the low gravity Wells, making it possible to jump from planet to planet ..

Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died

#164

Post by blacksmith_tb »

Someone wrote: post #75
blacksmith_tb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure how long it'd take to become socially acceptable, but I would bet we could make robotic tails for the elderly to help with balancing... accelerometer, motors and a few counterweights, controller and battery.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/08/26/business/tech/d... : “Devolution? Keio University team designs wearable robotic tail to help elderly keep their balance”

Ooh, that one is fancy! But looks like it will need some refinement to be untethered.

Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died

#165

Post by gigama »

jolesf wrote: post #42

Infinite in All Directions is still one of my favorite science books. "Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many common features. They share these features also with other enterprises such as art, literature, and music. The most salient features of all these enterprises are discipline and diversity. Discipline to submerge the individual fantasy in a greater whole. Diversity to give scope to the infi…

"Infinite In All Directions" is right here in my current reading stack next to Loren Eiseley's "All The Strange Hours"... they live on through their written words and all the lives they touched.

Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died

#166

Post by titzer »

asdkjh345 wrote: post #154
b0sk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia resulting in bushfires, famine and drought... seas taking over the cities are all demonstrable effects of climate change. Did he live in UK? Yea the winter was milder I guess.

>the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia Are no hotter than many other years, decades ago. >resulting in bushfires, famine and drought There is no evidence linking the fires to "climate change". And I can find no evidence of any such famine even existing. Droughts are caused by depleting the water supply, not by warm weather. Warm weather increases rain. >seas taking over the cities Has not happened. The rate of…

>>the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia

> Are no hotter than many other years, decades ago.

Well there is a whole damn Wikipedia article about the subject if you are into reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Australia

And yeah, the summers are ridiculously hot and are actually hotter than many other years, decades ago, and keep getting hotter. One outlier from the 1970s doesn't invalidate the overall trend that it's fucking hot as hell, year after year. The outliers from those decades are the new normal now. Droughts are multi-year trend. And yeah, that's climate change, dude.

>>seas taking over the cities

> Has not happened. The rate of sea level rise has been stable for the 120 years we have good data. It has not accelerated.

Bull [https://www.sbs.com.au/news/never-seen-anything-like-that-ve...]. Fucking [https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/08/analysis-s...]. Shit [https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2680/new-study-finds-sea-level...].

>>are all demonstrable effects of climate change

> None of them are. They are things people insist MUST be caused by "climate change", but do so only using "common sense", rather than any actual evidence. Demonstrable requires evidence, not "common sense".

Please go argue with the thousands of people whose work the distilled news articles and Wikipedia articles are based on. They aren't sitting around churning out hackernews comments using "common sense" but are undertaking a very serious and organized scientific effort to understand just what the fuck is going on instead of absurd denialism.

Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died

#167

Post by refurb »

astrophysician wrote: post #54
aardvarks wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He would sometimes eat lunch with us postdocs (just randomly, on a whim) when I was a postdoc at IAS. He would always have something interesting to say or ask, generally about science but often offbeat or unexpected -- you couldn't help but notice both his wide-ranging intellectual interests (our field was not quite within his main expertise) and his very gracious manner in starting conversations that both he and we…

Thanks for sharing — yea completely agree, it’s always so much fun to be around people like Dyson. There’s more like him at Princeton (and everywhere else, I was at university if Illinois for undergrad and the story is the same there), they just get a kick out of being curious, and always are genuinely interested to learn and hear new things, no matter how old they get. Such a pleasure to be around — they aren’t bitt…

I had a professor in graduate school like that. He was probably 70 and did natural product chemistry.

Unlike the other professors who were hard asses because: 1) they were still making a name for themselves or 2) they dealt with it in grad school, so you should too, he was the friendliest, most curious person. You could be a 2nd year undergrad and if you asked an interesting question, he’d get genuinely excited about it.

Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died

#168

Post by titzer »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #89
b0sk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia resulting in bushfires, famine and drought... seas taking over the cities are all demonstrable effects of climate change. Did he live in UK? Yea the winter was milder I guess.

There are plant species that are dependent upon fire for reproduction. Such species begin to die if all fire is suppressed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte https://www.gardenguides.com/97493-eucalyptus-trees-australi... https://www.bushheritage.org.au/species/grass-trees https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-fo... https://www.quora.com/What-seeds-need-fire-to-germinate-like... https://thek…

> The truth is we don't really know as much as some people like to pretend we do and we do present stories in a biased fashion. The people who are convinced we are hurtling towards our doom generally don't want to have a rational discussion of the evidence. They are too busy trying to insist that our lives are in imminent danger and there's no time for rational discussion, we must do something to stop this.

This comment is essentially self-refuting, since it would mean that you don't know as much as you like to pretend you do, and you are presenting a story in a biased fashion. Considering that its evidence includes a second-hand account of what one of your professors saying we are fleas on the butt of a dog, I'm gonna put it squarely in the "stories" category.

When I want to know what is happening with the climate and fires, I'm gonna trust billions of CPU hours of simulations based on computational fluid dynamics, numerical methods, satellite observations, and the laws of thermodynamics, economic modeling, and the scientific peer review process just a little bit more than the model your professor presents. Yeah, Earth is complicated. Fleas? Not helping the discussion.

Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died

#169

Post by gwern »

jetrink wrote: post #49
gwern wrote: post #24

Noted physicist slain by oldest foe, gravity: "Mia Dyson says her father, at the age of 96 still regularly went to his office at Princeton University. On Wednesday, on such a visit, she says he suffered a fall and died of his injuries Friday morning." TBIs and elder falling are a terrifying source of morbidity and mortality. So many old people start their terminal decline when they fall, for no particularly good reas…

You might be interested in the Gravity Research Foundation[1]. It was founded in 1948 by Roger Babson, who also founded Babson College. Babson described gravity as "Our Enemy Number One" and blamed it for the drowning death of his sister. He hoped the foundation would lead to the discovery of an anti-gravity material. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Research_Foundation

Yes, I was alluding to that. The proposed methods are crazy, but there is a valid point in there, particularly for TBIs and falls.

Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died

#170

Post by gwern »

dmix wrote: post #27
gwern wrote: post #24

Noted physicist slain by oldest foe, gravity: "Mia Dyson says her father, at the age of 96 still regularly went to his office at Princeton University. On Wednesday, on such a visit, she says he suffered a fall and died of his injuries Friday morning." TBIs and elder falling are a terrifying source of morbidity and mortality. So many old people start their terminal decline when they fall, for no particularly good reas…

What an interesting perspective to consider and a statement on human fragility, especially in the context of such a great man.

Unfortunately, no matter how great you are, you are still a few pounds of grayish peanut butter in a calcium jar.
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