The Scientist as Rebel

Freeman Dyson 2006, CMill 500 Dyson

Collection of book reviews for the New York Review

• p009 Failure of Hilberts Entsheidungsproblem (Halting) automated decision process for proofs

  • p010 Gödel undecidabiloty
• p012 Einstein and Oppenheimer uninterested in black holes hypothesized by Oppenheimer and Snyder in 1939

• p015 Friedrich Dürrenmatt grotesque play The Physicists, "how we look to the rest of the human race"

• p029 Haldane 1923 book Daedalus

• p033 Thomas Gold invades a new field of research with an outrageous theory, sometimes wrong.
  • "Science is no fun if you are never wrong"

  • production of methane in mantle, The Deep Hot Biosphere, 1999

• p039 The Future Needs Us, biotechnology with caution, without suppression

• p053 Vaclav Smil The Earth's Biosphere MIT press 2002

  • p066 Energy at the Crossroads MIT press 2003

  • Vladimir Vernadsky
• p079 Alfred Jodl strategist, condemned at Nuremberg
  • Hermann Balck field commander, "doing more with less"

  • Soldatentum - military professionalism run wild (like Robert E. Lee)

• p079 Russians fear asian hordes (camps organized for war) from the east, 350 years of invasions by Mongols and Tartars
  • turning point at battle of Kulikovo
  • George Kennan, decades as diplomat in Russia, decades at IAS Princeton
• p111 great³uncle Robert Haynes paid by british government to manumit Barbados slaves in 1833 (20 M pounds paid)

• p123 Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed by Philip Hallie about Le Chambon sur Lignon sheltering hundreds of Jews. Pastor Trocmé convince Major Schmehling to overlook this

• p127 The Race is Over, 1995 stockpile study with John Richter and John Kammerdiener from Los Alamos, Seymore Sack from Livermore, and Robert Peurifoy from Sandia. Unanimously agreed that bombs with replacement components need and the pnot be tested, modelling is sufficient.
  • p131 Reliable Replacement Warhead, RRW, makes technical but not political sense
• p133 January 1939 meeting in Washington DC, Bohr and Fermi publically described splitting the atom.
  • Possibility of bombs widely reported in newspapers.

    • KHL note Cleve Cartmill 1944 story "Deadline" discussed isotope separation and scientist misgivings, all gleaned from open literature

  • Joseph Rotblat (stuck in Poland) might have introduced ethical discussions, started Pugwash after war, Nobel Peace Prize in 1995

• p157 Yuri Manin's Mathematics and Physics PSU QA37.2 .M3413

• p187 Newton memoirs sold and scattered by British facist Lord Lymington, reassembled by Keynes and others

  • biographies Never at Rest by Richard Westfall 1983, James Gleick 2003, ..Religion of.. by Frank Manuel (closet Unitarian)

• p201 Poincaré and Einstein, both passionate about electric timekeeping, both generated theories of relativity, but Poincaré timidly kept ether.

• p206 Historians of science: Thomas Kuhn, idea driven science, Peter Galison Image and Logic tool-driven science. PSU QC173.4 .M5 G35 1997TH Zürich

• p211 Einstein caustic about Poincaré, Poincaré glowingly recommended Einstein for professorship at ETH Zürich, Einstein never knew this
• p232 In 1949, Robert Oppenheimer helps Lansing Hammond place Commonwealth Fund Fellows for the Harkness Foundation in 1947, demonstrating great breadth of academic connections
  • p235 brilliant administrator at Los Alamos, kept scientists focused on military goals
  • likened to Lawrence of Arabia, fond of poet George Herbert
• p243 Rutherford with Cockcroft and Walton, 500KeV machine in April 1932, equipment delayed but experiments pre-designed

  • Bryan Cathcart The Fly in the Cathedral Mult Midland 539.762 C362f 2005, Wash Brookwood 539.762 CATHCART

• p259 Norbert Wiener The Human Use of Human Beings PSU Q310 .W53 1950

• p287 2nd edition Bernal's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil longish essay with Dyson's biological extrapolations, later used in Disturbing the Universe" chapters "Thought Experiments" and "Greening the Galaxy"

• p338 "... fondness for beetles ..." attributed to Haldane in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, possibly cribbed from Darwin