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Freeman Dyson identifies himself in Who's Who in America
as a physicist and a professor at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, N.J. Dyson is, in fact, one of the world's
great thinkers -- physicist, mathematician to start
with and then astronomer -- a scientist whose intelligence
constitutes his entire equipment, apart from pencil and
paper.
His
field of inquiry could be called pure science, but as a man of conscience and
compassion living in the world of men and women and children, he is profoundly
concerned with their well-being. Growing up in England between two world wars
and aware, even as a schoolboy, of immanent catastrophe, he became an ardent Gandhian
pacifist. Then, at nineteen, a civilian in 1943, he was assigned to investigate
the losses on nighttime bombing missions of the fearfully overloaded Lancasters
the British Bomber Command was flying. He figured the odds; they were appalling.
But neither the military bureaucracy nor his civilian superiors were willing to
consider radical measures to reduce them. From then on, while pursuing with spectacular
success -- first with Hans Bethe at Cornell and then with Robert Oppenheimer at
Princeton -- his own vocation of perceiving and describing the laws that govern
the universe, from sub-atomic particles to galaxies, he has also been continuously
involved in the intense moral issues affecting all of us -- from disarmament to
the control of recombinant DNA research. Dyson says,
"I am trying in this book to describe to people who are not scientists the
way the human situation looks to somebody who is a scientist.... A substantial
part of the book is autobiography. To understand the nature of science and its
interaction with society, to approach the ethical problems associated with science,
one must examine the individual scientist and how he confronts the world around
him and must study real dilemmas faced by real scientists. I write about my own
experiences because I do not know so much about anyone else's. But almost any
scientists of my generation could tell a similar story." It
is doubtful, however, that "any scientist" or most writers could achieve
the masterpiece of autobiography plus meditation plus declaration of faith we
confront in Disturbing the Universe. Its portraits alone -- of Bethe, Oppenheimer,
Dick Feynman, Edward Teller, Theodore Taylor and the heroic Frank Thompson --
are irresistible in their intimacy and vitality. That it achieves Dyson's announced
purpose seems almost secondary. In the speed and beauty of its writing. In its
unsparing self-revelation and in its fundamental optimism it is a marvel of humane
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