A ‘Rebel’ Without a Ph.D.

[n2doc]

By: Thomas Lin
March 26, 2014

Freeman Dyson — the world-renowned mathematical physicist who helped found quantum electrodynamics with the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and others, devised numerous mathematical techniques, led the team that designed a low-power nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes for research hospitals, dreamed of exploring the solar system in spaceships propelled by nuclear bombs, wrote technical and popular science books, penned dozens of reviews for The New York Review of Books, and turned 90 in December — is pondering a new math problem.

“There’s a class of problem that Freeman just lights up on,” said the physicist and computational biologist William Press, a longtime colleague and friend. “It has to be unsolved and well-posed and have something in it that admits to his particular kind of genius.” That genius, he said, represents a kind of “ingenuity and a spark” that most physicists lack: “The ability to see further in the mathematical world of concepts and instantly grasp a path to the distant horizon that’s the solution.”

Press said he’s posed a number of problems to Dyson that didn’t “measure up.” Months and years went by, with no response. But when Press asked a question about the “iterated prisoner’s dilemma,” a variation of the classic game theory scenario pitting cooperation against betrayal, Dyson replied the next day. “It probably only took him a minute to grasp the solution,” Press said, “and half an hour to write it out.”

Together, they published a much-cited 2012 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

more

https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140326-a-rebel-without-a-ph-d/

[bananas]

1. Men of Mathematics is at archive.org

https://archive.org/details/MenOfMathematics

[Edim]

2. Dyson rocks and

is right about AGW. Time and observations will prove him right.

[caraher]

3. Dyson is ill-informed on AGW

There's little more to his critique than a generic concern about the perils of computer modeling. He gets simple facts wrong and is uninterested in delving into the technical issues deeply enough to engage the people actually doing the work, with the result that he misrepresents that work.

What evidence have you that "Dyson is right?" It seems like your personal "gut feeling." Dyson doesn't even have current/recent past observations right, so I'm not inclined to think time will do him any favors...

[Edim]

4. I just agree with him about AGW

and it's not my personal "gut feeling". It's my conclusion, after checking out the consensus AGW claims. None of them stand up to scrutiny. The global temperature plateau and the climategate emails confirm my conclusion - it's a very destructive scientific paradigm. It suppresses science progress and wastes enormous amounts of money, time and resources. It also takes money form the poor to help the rich.