Freeman Dyson: Character And Thinking vs Conformity
Freeman Dyson’s doubts about global warming were dismissed, ridiculed, and he was attacked personally. Such is science these days — in many ways, little different than the raucous general society.
Dyson says it’s only principle that leads him to question global warming: “According to the global-warming people, I say what I say because I’m paid by the oil industry. Of course I’m not, but that’s part of their rhetoric. If you doubt it, you’re a bad person, a tool of the oil or coal industry.” Global warming, he added, “has become a party line.”
What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.”
The insights in Dyson’s statement should be the basis for all education: the development of critical intelligence. The uneducated run to and give credence to experts, but make no distinction; ultimately true believers parrot what they hear, using the expert as the unassailable proof. People forget that they are quoting people, expert or no, with all their frailties.
≡≡≡≡≡≡
I have to include this anecdote about Dyson — it has a theatrical feeling. It is almost a set piece, except it is true, and funny:
…taking problems to Dyson is something of a parlor trick. A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer where, if you take its last digit and move it to the front, turning, say, 112 to 211, it’s possible to exactly double the value. Dyson will immediately say, “Oh, that’s not difficult,” allow two short beats to pass and then add, “but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long.” When this happened one day at lunch, William Press remembers, “the table fell silent; nobody had the slightest idea how Freeman could have known such a fact or, even more terrifying, could have derived it in his head in about two seconds.” The meal then ended with men who tend to be described with words like “brilliant,” “Nobel” and “MacArthur” quietly retreating to their offices to work out what Dyson just knew.
Dyson is smart, and then some, but more importantly, Dyson seeks insight.
