Professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Freeman Dyson is an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician. The author of Disturbing the Universe, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
"[The letters] cover a remarkable range of scientific interests,
acquaintances, opinions and adventures… He says what you wouldn’t
expect; if Dyson has a pattern, perhaps it is contrariety… The one
Dysonian pattern for which the letters hold unequivocal evidence is
delight. He uses the word often and invokes it even more…Maybe with
some people, you don’t look for patterns. You just enjoy their
multivariate company."
*Ann Finkbeiner, Nature*
"There is much in the letters collected here to enjoy; Mr. Dyson
writes wonderfully well."
*Ray Monk, The Wall Street Journal*
"A firsthand account of one of the greatest periods of scientific
discovery…. A historic account of modern science and some of its
most influential thinkers… An informative collection."
*Library Journal*
"Who but Dyson formulates revolutionary physics while riding on a
Greyhound bus through Iowa cornfields? In other episodes in this
remarkable epistolary autobiography, readers join Dyson as he
assesses with Gödel equations for a rotating version of Einstein’s
universe, as he defends Feynman’s quantum theorems against
Oppenheimer’s doubts, and as he explores with Bohr the prospects
for a nuclear spaceship. Readers will naturally value what Dyson
reveals about how he built his towering reputation as a scientist.
But Dyson draws the substance of his narrative from letters he sent
his parents between 1940 and 1980, letters in which he discloses
quite unscientific aspects of his life—including the joys of
romance, marriage, and fatherhood, as well as the trauma of
divorce…. Dyson never lets readers forget that, for all of their
exceptional intellectual gifts, scientists live human lives defined
more by family ties and friendships than by laboratory
results."
*Booklist [Starred Review]*
"Advocates of science will find in Dyson an admirable model. Why go
to Mars when we could irrigate the Sahara, he asks. The science of
space travel may be 10 times the benefit in the end, he writes, but
'the main purpose is a general enlargement of human horizons.' A
pleasure for science students and particularly of science humanely
practiced."
*Kirkus Reviews*
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