PHYSICIST DYSON EXPLORED THE MORALITY OF SCIENCE.
Freeman Dyson, a mathematician and physicist who has died aged 96, brought a deep moral sensibility to his understanding of the possibilities and dangers of scientific advance.
Dyson rose to notice at age 24 when he showed that a number of seemingly incompatible theories of quantum electrodynamics that attempt to explain the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with matter were not only reconcilable but identical.
Equally important was Dyson’s work as an interpreter of science for the general public. His books included the autobiographical Disturbing the Universe (1979); Weapons and Hope (1984), a meditation on nuclear disarmament; and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (1999), a forward-looking review of the potential for good and ill of important technologies.
In each of these books Dyson wanted to explain the moral and theoretical issues involved. He was no pessimist about the possibilities of science, and his freewheeling imagination enabled him to suggest new avenues for scientific inquiry.
Dyson was born in England and earned a math degree at Cambridge in 1945. At Cornell University he studied with Hans Bethe, a future Nobel laureate who had spent the war years on the Manhattan Project, and former Los Alamos scientist Richard Feynman; and at Princeton with Robert Oppenheimer. In 1951 he became professor of physics at Cornell and two years later moved to Princeton in the same capacity.
Later, he worked at General Dynamics with Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb, on developing a small nuclear reactor, which produces short-lived isotopes for diagnostic medicine; it is still made today.
Working at the American Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, he took part in test ban negotiations. As chairman of the Federation of American Scientists, an organization founded in 1945 by former Manhattan Project scientists, he addressed the dangers and implications of the nuclear age.
From the mid-1960s Dyson turned to writing scientific texts, but with Disturbing the Universe he addressed the general public, winning an American Book Award nomination. He received several other honours, including the Templeton Prize in 2000.