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| Dr. Freeman Dyson |
By Nicholas Dawidoff, Mar. 25, 2014, New York Times Magazine
"...Dyson seems to see the world as an
interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate. Climate change
is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible.
But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his
interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is
a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great
problem.
Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong
about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the
conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International
Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is
inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving,
Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and
fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and
has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate
Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee
fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize
— but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when
consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to
chip at the ice.”
Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be
defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global
warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity
of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so
profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much
of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All
Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as
possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own
relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the
Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another
possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by
expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of
our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations
come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good
scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or,
as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong…"
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