Freeman Dyson, a visionary and renaissance physicist, dies at 96

Freeman Dyson, a visionary physicist and technophile who helped crack the secrets of the subatomic world, tried to build a spaceship that could carry humans across the solar system, worked to dismantle nuclear arsenals and wrote elegantly about science and human destiny, died Feb. 28 at a hospital near his home in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 96.

The cause was complications from a fall, said a son, George Dyson.

Dyson, born in England between the world wars, spent most of his professional life as a kind of genius-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, overlapping in his early years with Albert Einstein.

In a career spent traversing fields as diverse as physics, biology, astronomy, nuclear energy, arms control, space travel and science ethics, Dyson was always obliging when a journalist called him for a grabby quote about the trajectory of humanity.

His ideas were reliably unorthodox; the Pulitzer Prizewinning classical composer Paul Moravec once called him “the world’s most civil heretic.”

Of all his notions, his most famous was that alien civilizations, seeking to maximize their supply of energy, would build elaborate megastructures around their parent stars to capture much of the solar radiation. Astronomers periodically see something that they speculate might be one of these “spheres” - although Dyson freely admitted he lifted the idea from science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon.

Long before he became an oracle, he labored in the trenches of mathematics and physics. He succeeded in the late 1940s in developing an early landmark synthesis of the latest thinking in the theory known as quantum electrodynamics. His resulting paper, “The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman,” was regarded as an instant classic and gave Dyson lifelong credibility in the sciences even as he went on to tackle more speculative interests.