RIP to an amazing mind and man. He lived in interesting times.
RIP Freeman Dyson: The super-boffin who applied his mathematical brain to nuclear magic, quantum physics, space travel, and more
Freeman Dyson, the eminent British-American physicist and mathematician best known for his theoretical work in quantum electrodynamics, died today. He was 96. His death was announced by his daughter Mia Dyson via Maine public television and the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) – the top research hub in Princeton, New Jersey, …
COMMENTS
-
-
Sunday 1st March 2020 22:31 GMT bombastic bob
agreed, sad to see him go. Even sadder (to see him go that is), he was apparently an anthropogenic climate change skeptic...
DEFINITELY even MORE sad to see him go. The world's average IQ probably went down a point.
-
Sunday 1st March 2020 22:43 GMT hammarbtyp
agreed, sad to see him go. Even sadder (to see him go that is), he was apparently an anthropogenic climate change skeptic...
No he wasn't, although unfortunately his name was bandied around by those who want to legitimize their beliefs. What he believed was global warming would not necessarily result in worldwide disaster. Probably understandable within the context of a man who felt that any problem could be solved with enough application of resources and human intelligence, but not necessarily a great one for those left behind.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Saturday 29th February 2020 11:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: ...he didn't die of "old age"...
My mother died of 'old age' - it says so on the death certificate. That's an ignominious death.
I wouldn't agree, not at that age. When my Gran died a few months past her 100th birthday my Mum said that "old age" as the cause of death was very comforting, it just reflected the way life was supposed to be. A cause of death from some disease or accident would have been distressing, but there's nothing ignominious about living your life fully until its natural end.
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 10:18 GMT Ian Johnston
Re: ...he didn't die of "old age"...
When my Gran died a few months past her 100th birthday my Mum said that "old age" as the cause of death was very comforting, it just reflected the way life was supposed to be.
Mine went at 101.5, and had "extreme old age" as the cause of death. We rather liked that.
-
-
-
Saturday 29th February 2020 18:07 GMT keithpeter
Re: Nothing ignomious
Alas, falls of any kind when you are over 80 or so can be serious. I know this from experience with family members. It is part of the 'old age' experience.
Robotic exoskeletons?
Coat: mine's the one with a copy of Disturbing the Universe in the pocket. His generation basically invented operations reseach (sort of a gap year project during ww2)
-
Sunday 1st March 2020 10:33 GMT Muscleguy
Re: Nothing ignomious
I'm 54 and have fallen over while running and walking recently. All I suffered were skinned knees and hands and hurt pride. Oh and I put a hole in my good black trousers. My life was not in danger.
Freeman Dyson died from injuries suffered in a fall. Muscle strength declines with age even though the rate of decline slows if you make, strenuous, efforts to keep your muscles up. When you fall in age you often fall badly, unable to catch yourself. This causes breaks and head injuries which can be fatal. Broken bones sometimes release KCl into the blood which can affect the heart and brain. The risk of this being fatal rises with age.
I have fallen in recent years without catching myself, running on slick concrete pavers in worn street shoes. Trying to round a corner my feet went out from under me and I went down, hands by my sides as if I'd been poleaxed. I smacked face first into one of those concrete pavers. Falling from my 6' height with the momentum of running. My long straight nose came to the rescue and all I did was break it, again. Though it hurt so much I lost vision for some seconds.
But if I'd fallen to the side or slipped over backwards things might have been rather different. No crash barrier nose to cusion the blow on the skull. When you fall inside there are lots of things you can hit your head on.
You have to die of something, to get to 96 he would need a good immune system so disease was unlikely to get him. So injury was it.
I have told my wife and kids that dying from an aneurism say whilst runing (my heart appears bulletproof) would be a good way to go for me and they shouldn't beat themselves up if it happens. I will have died doing something I love. Freeman Dyson died trying to go to the office, at 96. He died trying to do something he clearly loved. No sitting around in a retirement home mumbling for Freeman. What a guy.
-
Sunday 1st March 2020 22:36 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Nothing ignomious
I saw an aging character (one of the musketeers) say, in a movie, "I'd rather die in battle than in bed, in a pool of my own piss". Or something like that.
The fact that he was going to/from his old office at the time, apparently thinking about stuff and/or doing sciency things with his time, sorta the same as a warrior dying in battle...
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Saturday 29th February 2020 17:45 GMT Flocke Kroes
Re: In other news...
I read the notice to airmen and was confused because SN01 was obviously not ready to fly. It needed cryo-hardening and a pressure test. Clearly they tried to do both at once with liquid nitrogen and the notice to airmen was in case the pressure test got ahead of the cryo-hardening and a boiling nitrogen propelled rocket took off.
There is plenty to smile about. The rings were in good shape while they were being welded together but the welds shrank as they cooled so SN01 was nothing like as strong as planned. At best it would have done an up and down like star hopper. It looks like they fixed the weld shrinking problem with pieces of SN02 - most of which is on site, including the wings. SN02 might well go up, come down sideways and do a belly flip before landing - or do a spectacular RUD. 301 stainless is cheap to buy, quick to weld and scrap has recycle value so Starship development can race along with entertaining explosions without costing 0.01% of an SLS.
-
-
-
-
Saturday 29th February 2020 11:40 GMT ClockworkOwl
A sad passing, but another legend is sure to have been born...
The couple of generations of physicists and general scientific thinkers he belonged to has totally transformed science. I was going to start a list of names, but it's futile, there's too many.
There seems to have been an almost 'critical mass' of thinking going on, all round the world.
From Einsteins' work on the photoelectric effect presaging quantum theory, to Gell Manns' 'Eightfold way' leading to Quantum Chromodynamics. In less than 50 years!!!
Sadly there are not too many of those generations left, fortunately they were seriously inspiring.
Hope your finding all the good company again...
-
Saturday 29th February 2020 16:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'm afraid you are wrong, but in an overly pessimistic way.
The 19th century saw enormous scientific and technological progress. When it started, steam engines were mostly atmospheric and all ships relied on sails. When it ended, not only had biology been revolutionised by Darwin and Mendel, but the electric motor had gone from a toy to a major power transformation method, the telephone was spreading, the reciprocating high pressure steam engine was already in competition with the steam turbine, coal was being replaced with oil, thermodynamics were on a sound footing, the atomic theory was solid and theoretical chemistry was well advanced, the germ theory of disease was established, and the electric light bulb was already well developed (and the technologies needed made the X-ray tube, the CRT, and the thermionic valve possible, thus making possible the results that Einstein would explain). Michelson and Morley had laid the aether to rest and thereby created another problem for Einstein to solve, the photographic process was fully established thus creating the conditions for the discovery of radioactivity, and Babbage and Ada Lovelace had laid the foundations for stored program computing. Whitworth had demonstrated the importance of precision instruments and machine tools by mid-century and laid the foundations not only for motor vehicles of all kinds, but of precision experimental apparatus.
Given a much smaller educated world population in the 19th century*, their achievements were all the more remarkable.
Not to knock Dyson in any way, but the idea that the first half of the 20th century somehow transformed science is just bunk. It built on a past which, in just a century, had changed the understanding of the world out of all recognition and provided the power and engineering that would make new discoveries possible.
*Universal primary education was another Victorian development, along with the sewage systems that increased infant life expectancy enough to make it worthwhile.
-
-
Saturday 29th February 2020 20:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yup. Poincaré in particular, and Ernst Mach is another one I should have mentioned. If I bothered to go back to my books (my history hobby is that of technology from about 1830 -1930) I could add an awful lot more. The fact is that the 19th century - particularly in England and Germany - laid the foundations of the modern world, though whether or not that's a good thing is a matter of opinion.
-
-
Sunday 1st March 2020 10:43 GMT ClockworkOwl
You appear to have missed the point...
All the Victorian discovery also needed all the developments before it as well.
However, thermodynamics was the main physics cannon at that time, other aspects were mainly "interesting oddities" like the aether drift experiment etc.
I suggest looking at a university physics text book from before the turn of the century, and compare with a 1040s version. There's an order of magnitude more topics and depth.
Sure the Victorians were clever engineers,and there were a few early scientists, but the likes of Nicola Tesla never really followed the scientific method.
So the idea the the first half of the 20th century transformed science is actually unarguable, only the rosiest of tinted spectacles would see the last half of the 19th as having been more important...
-
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 09:12 GMT ClockworkOwl
Prove it, show me a published peer reviewed physics paper from before 1880...
Maxwell was a mathematician, along with so many truly insightful victorians and earlier.
I'm not denigrating anyone here, but they come from the age where real science was still rare and poorly understood. They were the first to mostly deny rumour and opinion, but still lacked the scientific method.
So not wrong at all...
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 14:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Maxwell was a mathematician, along with so many truly insightful victorians and earlier
Oh for fuck's sake stop being an idiot. Maxwell was the person who sorted out classical electromagnetism. He's the person of whom Feynman said
From the long view of this history of mankind – seen from, say, 10,000 years from now – there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electromagnetism.
The paper in which he introduced the theory, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field was read at the FRS in 1864 and then peer-reviewed by William Thomson (oh, look, another famous 19th century physicist!) before being published in 1865 as A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. 155: 459–512. You can read it here.
So, are you going to now argue that the classical electrodynamics is somehow not physics? What on earth was the course I did in my second year of my physics degree called 'classical electromagnetism' about then?
OK, you're free to make yourself look like a fool in public if you like, but I'm done here: arguing with fools is a waste of time I could spend arguing with people who aren't.
-
-
-
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 16:27 GMT asdf
>There is more to science than physics, though nobody dares tell the physicists that.
And what Darwin did was very important for sure but he only finally published because someone else had already figured out his big idea. Some discoveries are huge for sure but often would have been found by peer scientists in short order anyway. Even in biology things like protein folding are based on physics.
-
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 10:24 GMT Ian Johnston
Sure the Victorians were clever engineers,and there were a few early scientists, but the likes of Nicola Tesla never really followed the scientific method.
Tesla was - initially anyway - a good engineer but a lousy scientist. If he had taken the time to read and understand Maxwell's work from fifty years earlier he would never have wasted the time and money he did on Wardenclyffe Tower.
-
-
-
-
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 12:05 GMT Cuddles
All science is based on earlier science. If we had to reinvent everything from scratch all the time, we'd never get anywhere. Remember that thing about standing on the shoulders of giants? It actually dates back to at least the 12th century, and was repeated many times before Newton made the quote that is best known today. Arguing about who was the greatest scientist based on whether later work relies on them or not is completely pointless. It always does, and that has been well understood by the scientists themselves for centuries (and most likely much longer). A statement that more recent science is based on older science is at best a banal tautology, and unfortunately more commonly a sad attempt to denigrate those who have had the sense to learn from others just because someone wants to play Top Trumps with famous scientists.
-
-
-
-
-
Saturday 29th February 2020 20:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Ringworld
Actually both are things he'd probably not want to be remembered for. Embarrassing to be associated with two ideas that wouldn't work; I believe he himself later on said the Dyson sphere wasn't possible. Larry Niven's Ringworld depends on magical unobtainium to get from one side to the other, and his proposed method of stabilising it would set up oscillations, which wouldn't be fun.
Both are reminders of how over-optimistic scientists and engineers got post-Bomb, when it seemed endless energy was readily available, but computer modelling hadn't caught up with just how difficult it was going to be to do complex things.
-
Sunday 1st March 2020 15:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Ringworld
Yes and no. Knowing how to do the math and having the ambition to ask questions is of high value. Even if you find out it's impossible.
Types of dyson swarms might be possible though IIRC (no orbitals are 100% perfect, but that applies to all 2 or 3 body and more systems. :P ).
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 06:13 GMT StargateSg7
Re: Ringworld
I quite beg to differ in that people say that a Dyson Sphere (aka Dyson Shells) WOULD NOT WORK!
They CAN work very well when solid blocks of material made out of ceramic-coated steels and/or tungsten are used as the base structural element and then kept together on a segment-by-segment basis by spring-like carbon nano-tube cross-beam structures on the 2D-XY axis (i.e. the sides) and Z axis (i.e. vertical or depth axis) that act like shock absorbers keeping whole arrays/tiles of Dyson Blocks uniformly together to form the greater Dyson Shell. The individual segments STILL have spacing in-between them but those individual segments are large enough that massive amounts of living space is available for inhabitants.
We've done the engineering MATH and the simulations on just such a structure that is Earth Orbit in size and the ONLY issues we had was noticing that the Dyson Shell we humans CAN construct in less than a few hundred years needs to be multi-layered with multiple INNER LAYERS that absorb and convert all the incoming solar radiation of many EM bands into usable forms of thermal and electrical energy.
The OTHER issue was calculating HOW to form and place numerous BLOCKS of Tungsten and/or Steel in such a way that the outer layers would have enough mass to exert ONE GRAVITY on the inhabitants. The multiple layers of blocks would be held somewhat evenly outwards (i.e. the Z axis) into a pressure shell similar to that of a balloon by the outwards rush of solar radiation coming from the interior star.
Those layered blocks of about 100 km by 100 km in area and being about 10 km thick and held vertically about 500-to-1000 km apart from each other are held in a somewhat loose configuration on the X and Y axis by spring-like carbon nanotube structures that would allow expansion and contraction between layers AND would allow those blocks to have enough total AGGREGATE MASS such that the outer layers would be equal to one full gravity for free-standing human habitation and be able to hold a enough human breathable atmosphere on the outer surface of each block of tungsten and/or steel.
Freeman Dyson simply DID NOT HAVE ACCESS to the massive supercomputing horsepower we have today, so he was NOT ABLE to expound and expand upon his theories out to the actual mechanical engineering that would be required to build an Earth orbit sized Dyson Shell.
By keeping individual blocks to 100 km by 100 km (10,000 square km) in area, it allows enormous amounts of living space to be made available for the average human AND such small block sizes allow the Dyson Shell to be FLEXIBLE enough that the typically chaotic emissions of the interior star allows the Dyson Shell segments to move in a wave-like fashion much like a raft of boats tied together on a moving ocean.
Since all the Dyson Shell segments are LINKED together by the carbon Nanotube shock-absorption system, it is then possible to use advanced computer control to use "rocket engines" that are attached to each axis of every segment so as to take into account and manage the concentric orbit and oscillations of the interior star so that the entire Dyson Shell flexes and moves along with the star, keeping it centred within the Dyson Shell.
All this has been PROVEN to be workable on our computing systems, so Freeman Dyson HAD IT RIGHT! A Dyson Sphere IS DEFINITELY POSSIBLE with current 2020-era human computing and materials engineering technology!
We can GET quintillions of tonnes of steel and/or tungsten from multiple metal rich dying or exploded stars and construct those massive Dyson Shell segments held loosely by carbon nanotubes if enough people are employed in building it. Give us 3 BILLION workers and we can finish an Earth orbit sized Dyson Sphere in 250 years!
For a 100 layer Segmented Dyson Shell with each layer separate by 500-to-1000 km on the vertical and about 50 km on the X and Y axis, the AVERAGE area would be about 280,000,000,000,000,000 square KM per layer. (i.e. 280 Quintillion Square KM)
Of the 100 layers, the lower 75 would have to designated for solar radiation energy conversion purposes and for society's factories / manufacturing facilities because of low gravity and excessive solar radiation exposures.
The OUTER 25 layers would have enough total aggregate gravitational pull coming from the inner layers of steel and/or tungsten segment blocks to have outer surface gravities of between 1.0 to 1.3 of Earth's surface gravity which is enough to hold a breathable atmosphere onto each of the individual segment surfaces.
That means the total living space for the outer 25 layers would be 7,000,000,000,000,000,000 square KM and with our current Year 2020 human population of about 7.8 billion people, that means EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON EARTH could have 897,435,897 square KM of living space all to themselves within the Dyson Sphere.
.
SO YES !!! Dyson Spheres CAN be built if we have access to enough building materials coming from dead metal rich stars !!!
.
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 10:27 GMT Ian Johnston
Re: Ringworld
Both are reminders of how over-optimistic scientists and engineers got post-Bomb, when it seemed endless energy was readily available, but computer modelling hadn't caught up with just how difficult it was going to be to do complex things.
And a direct precursor of today's belief that algorithms can solve all human problems.
-
Wednesday 4th March 2020 07:20 GMT StargateSg7
Re: Ringworld
"....And a direct precursor of today's belief that algorithms can solve all human problems....."
---
Actually, computer simulations and algorithmic technical specification derivation and/or extension CAN SOLVE MOST of humanity's problems that are technical rather than political or social in nature!
Can we build and MANAGE a Dyson Sphere? YES!
Can we solve world hunger using computer-based plant growing technology? YES!
Can we build a new super-strong, computer-algorithm-calculated frame for a Bicycle? OH YES!
Can we stop people from drinking too much alcohol or doing too much drugs using computers? NAH!
Cuz that's a SOCIAL problem that can be modeled in cyberspace but not RUN PERFECTLY by real people in the real world because EACH REAL WORLD PERSON has their own foibles and quirks not easily controlled as a variable!
Algorithms SHOULD be used for the situations which have actual controllable variables like gene splicing and mechanical engineering where inputs values are and can be constrained, NOT for social activities that have faaaaaar too many personal interactions and emotional inputs from too many surrounding persons. It's too hard to CURRENTLY model and/or control simply because you cannot constrain/control enough of the varying input values!
Ergo, leave human social issues to the personal-feelings-psychologists and leave Dyson Sphere engineering and management to the rules-based-expert-system Algorithms!
.
-
-
-
-
Sunday 1st March 2020 07:23 GMT Conundrum1885
Orion
Hi, I'm sure the great man would rather have seen the stockpiles of plutonium used to help deflect the next Doomsday asteroid.
Orion in the context of compressed-liner fusion *may* work but at a pinch setting off multiple low yield warheads en route with an Ir alloy pusher plate to ensure a fast intercept would be possible. I did some BOTE calculations suggesting a berkelium enrichment reactor based on one from a nuclear submarine would permit warheads to be made about once ever 2.5 days with a "Coke can" sized pulse unit and external pulsed laser based trigger for safety with 5*100MT warheads for deflection.
Even got as far as designing one with a 90 ton yield which is the lower end of feasibility but unable to test due to entirely avoidable politics.
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 11:14 GMT MrMerrymaker
Dirty nuke myth
"If the United States gets attacked with a nuclear weapon, it won’t be from a government at all, but it will be a bunch of bad guys carrying a weapon in a suitcase or in a car or in a truck or something of that kind. You won’t even know where it comes from. "
While I agree with the sentiment, it's a shame such a vaunted genius is perpetuating the myth of the suitcase nuke or dirty bomb.
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 11:22 GMT Trixr
Shame that his later years were somewhat less sparkling regarding his confusing and well-promoted views on climate change - a classic example of poorly informed opinions co-opted by those whose agendas the confusion supported.
But it still doesn't overshadow the amazing contributions he made to mathematics and physics for many decades.
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 12:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yes, it would be interesting to know where he went wrong with that. It is an unfortunately-sometime-true stereotype that old physicists tend to think they can just wade in to other fields and understand them (there's even at least one xkcd) when it turns out they can't. There are also standard mistakes physicists make when trying to understand the greenhouse effect using spherical-cow approximations, the most common (which I have made!) being 'well, there's so much CO2 already that the atmosphere is already opaque at the wavelengths it blocks, so more can't make any real difference': the first part of this is true, the second isn't.
-
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 12:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
lots of ideas not all good.
Sounds like a great guy. Shame that suitcase nuclear bomb theory has be used by the bigwigs in the pentagon as an excuse to inflict suffering on various nations over the years.
I bet the USA is still puzzling how to make its own suitcase nuclear bomb. A real one not one like those seen in every other film.
Sometimes you wonder if these paranoid specimens get mixed up one day doing their super forcasting after an nights movie viewing.
-
-
Monday 2nd March 2020 20:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: lots of ideas not all good.
It was once believed that "Red Mercury" was actually a codename for lithium deuteride.
A true "suitcase" physics package would be nearly impossible but the W45 used very highly enriched materials that made its half life quite short. They were all reprocessed a long time ago.
Seems that some of the W45 components did get recycled though.
A pure fusion device may be possible but even less portable than that: minimum estimates would be 800-1200 kilos for a 0.2MT yield.
-
-