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Rebel without a pause
Robert P. Crease delves into a life of Freeman Dyson, a theoretical physicist who chose a non-conformist path.
Freeman Dyson looks like a wizard. Tall and lanky, he has piercing blue eyes, elfin ears, an aquiline nose and a full head of hair, despite being in his 90th year. From the cover of Phillip Schewe's buoyant biography Maverick Genius, he stares at us with an expression that is half cherub, half imp.
Dyson's career is marked by equally sharp contrasts. He has made significant contributions to technical areas of mathematical physics and quantum electrodynamics - but also to speculative fields such as space travel and astrobiology. His writings mix science and poetry. He is not religious, yet won the Templeton Prize for "progress in religion". He crusades against nuclear weapons, but engages in defence research. And he is known for taking heretical positions on subjects such as extrasensory perception and climate change. Yet his most eccentric facet is that he became an eminent theoretical physicist without having a PhD - a feat for which Richard Feynman, that other famous non-conformist of physics, much envied him.
"This is a biography," Schewe alerts us, "and not science history." Thus we learn of Dyson's beginnings in the United Kingdom, his early attraction to mathematics and his operations research at Royal Air Force Bomber Command during the Second World War. After the war, Dyson moved to the United States, where he worked first at Cornell University...