Freeman J. Dyson developed a general theory of quantum electrodynamics that integrates a number of specific concepts previously developed by Richard P. Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, among others. As a result of his work with Edward Teller on nuclear power plants and the fusion bomb, he became active in the debate over the nuclear test ban treaty, arguing first one side of the issue and then, at a later date, the opposite side. Since the late 1950s, Dyson has also been interested in space travel and in research on the possible existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
Freeman John Dyson was born on December 15, 1923, in Crowthorne, a village in the south of England. His father, George Dyson, was a music teacher at Winchester College, and later became director of the Royal College of Music in London. His mother, Mildred Atkey Dyson, was a lawyer. He has one sister, Alice. From an early age, Dyson had a passionate interest in mathematics, so much so that his mother expressed concern about his becoming too asocial if he followed that career. He was not deterred by her warnings, however, and, on one occasion when he was 15, taught himself calculus over the Christmas holidays from a mail-order textbook. After completing primary school, he enrolled at Winchester College and then, in 1941, entered Cambridge University to major in mathematics. His schooling was interrupted by World War II, however, when he was assigned to work in the operational research section of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. His experience in trying to make bombing runs more effective revealed to him the horrible loss of human life that was taking place and left a life long impression on him. He was particularly upset by his own role in promoting the war effort and later said that the only difference he could see between his own wartime work and that of Nazis who were tried and convicted at Nuremberg was that "they were sent to jail or hanged as war criminals and I went free."
At the war's completion, Dyson returned to Cambridge and received his bachelor of arts degree in mathematics in 1945. He then stayed on at Trinity College, Cambridge, for two years before winning a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship that allowed him to study physics at Cornell University. The next three years were especially significant in his life since he had nearly daily contact at Cornell with Hans Albrecht Bethe, Feynman, and Schwinger, three physicists who were at the forefront of research on quantum electrodynamics.
Quantum electrodynamics (QED) is a field of physics that attempts to understand the interaction between electromagnetic fields and atoms. The origins of QED go back to the research of Paul Dirac, Werner Karl Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and other physicists during the early 1930s. As successful as early theories of QED were, many unsolved questions and problems remained nearly two decades later. By the late 1940s, however, many of these problems had begun to yield to the analysis of Bethe, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga.
Dyson's contribution to this effort was primarily that of a synthesizer. He showed how the independent theories of his colleagues could be brought together into a single unified theory of QED. The solution that he discovered occurred to him on a bus ride from California to the East Coast in the summer of 1948. He has explained that after working on the problems for many months, he had decided to take a vacation and to stop thinking about QED. But then, returning from his vacation, the solution for which he had been looking "suddenly became, somehow, transcendentally clear. It was one of those moments of illumination...which every scientist hopes for. It only happens once in a lifetime, but, anyway, it did happen."
In 1951, Dyson was invited to become professor of physics at Cornell, but he remained there for only two years. He had become more interested in the philosophy of physics and spent some time with J. Robert Oppenheimer discussing this topic. When he had the opportunity in 1953 to move to the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University, where Oppenheimer was director, he did so eagerly. He has remained at the institute ever since; he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1957.
During the 1950s, Dyson became particularly interested in the possibilities of nuclear power as a commercial source of energy. He began spending his summers at the General Atomic Company, a division of General Dynamics. This work brought him into contact with, among others, Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and another fervent advocate of the use of nuclear power. Together, the two developed a nuclear reactor called the High Temperature Graphite Reactor that they regarded as "safe even in the hands of an idiot." The model was never put into use in the United States, however, because the nuclear power industry judged the initial construction costs to be too high.
The launch of the first artificial satellite by the Soviet Union in 1957 brought an immediate and concerned response from U.S. political and scientific leaders, Dyson among them. To help keep the United States from falling behind the Soviets in space technology, Dyson took a leave of absence from Princeton to join a research and development effort, the Orion Project in La Jolla, California, to construct a nuclear-powered satellite. The project experienced some exciting successes early on, and Dyson later referred to his first year at La Jolla as "the most exciting and in many ways the happiest of my scientific life." The U.S. government eventually decided not to use nuclear power for its satellite systems, however, and in 1965, the Orion Project was officially terminated.
One of the programs with which Dyson's name is often connected is the search for the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. He points out that, as a young boy, the books of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells were among his favorite reading material. He even tells of finding among his mother's papers, after her death, an incomplete science fiction story about travel to the Moon that he had started while still a teenager, and then forgotten about. His imaginative writings about possible extraterrestrial contact include the book Disturbing the Universe, published in 1979. Dyson has advocated the exploration and colonization of deep space and remains a fervent backer of attempts to communicate with alien civilizations.
Dyson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1964 and continues to accumulate honors and prizes, including the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Society (1966), the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society (1968), the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society (1969), the Harvey Prize of the Israeli Institute of Technology (1977), and Israel's Wolf Prize (1981). Dyson married the former Verene Haefeli-Huber in 1950, and the couple had two children, Esther and George. They were divorced in 1958. Dyson then married Imme Jung, with whom he had four more children, Dorothy, Emily, Miriam, and Rebecca. Although he never earned a degree higher than the B.A., Dyson has been awarded honorary doctorates by a number of institutions, including Yeshiva University, Princeton University, and the University of Glasgow.
This is the complete article, containing 1,192 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
