Freeman Dyson, RIP

Freeman Dyson died today, Friday, 28 February 2020, age 96, at a hospital in his longtime home of Princeton, NJ. A thoughtful obituary by George Johnson just appeared (Friday night, 28 Feb 2020) on the New York Times website.

Dyson was a mathematical physicist who knew the greats -- Feynman, Oppenheimer, Bethe, Teller, and the rest -- and became great himself by contributing the theory of quantum electrodynamics. He was one of the final living members of the World War II generation of scientists who invented cryptography, radar, and, of course, nuclear weapons and who later wrote about and lobbied vigorously for their safe and controlled use. These scientists saw themselves also as humans, citizens, and small-d democrats who knew the essential need for public discussion of issues raised by the technology they created.

Dyson reminds me of Jacob Bronowski. Both were Englishmen, both mathematicians, and both authors of books overlapping science and the humanities. Bronowski is best known for his public television series The Ascent of Man (1973). Dyson, likewise, wrote many popular books, though in an unpopular way. He dared to bring in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Bertold Brecht, Ingmar Bergman, T.S. Eliot, and other nonscientist people of culture.

One of those books, his 1979 memoir Disturbing the Universe, I read over a cross-country Greyhound bus trip in January 1983. What I discovered in it was not science, nor memoir, but humanity. Dyson, for example, compared Richard Feynman to Jof the Juggler in Ingmar Bergman's film, The Seventh Seal (1956). That film, central now to my understanding of life, I did yet know, but Dyson's book sent me out to see it when it finally caught up to me. Thank you, Professor Dyson. One does not expect to learn such things in a scientist's memoir! (Feynman, of course, I have long known. Like so many of my generation, I learned physics partly by perusing all three volumes of The Feynman Lectures on Physics.)

Dyson was technological optimist. Problems on earth -- be they overpopulation or climate change -- either were not as serious as claimed or could be overcome by even more technology, such as space colonies somewhere else in the universe. One would travel there by spaceships powered by nuclear explosions. It is here I lose touch with Dyson. Perhaps I lack his imagination. Certainly I lack his faith in technological solutions to problems of human nature.

Disturbing the Universe introduced me as well to Goethe's Faust, particularly this favorite line from its Part I. It is a fitting quotation to a remembrance of Freeman Dyson: "All theory is gray, / But the tree of life, my friend, is green."

posted 2020-02-28, edited 2020-02-29

Red Mesa in the Distance

[Listen to this post read by its author.]

"Energy is eternal delight." -- William Blake (1793)

I call it my engineering aesthetic. But because of it, others call me an apostate. After all, what's natural is always better than what's artificial. So I have been told. I must respond, and I do. In rebuttal I insist that we humans are naturally makers, inventors, and builders. Just look at children supplied with finger paints, construction paper, and paste. In short, human nature is nature. But there's no use arguing any further. Suffice it to say there are particular products of human artifice delighting me. In such joy, I rest my case.

Prowling the western horizon with binoculars first suggested them, but these summer sightings were not yet definitive. That would wait for a clear winter's day, a western wind steadily blowing, and a willingness to shiver a bit watching from my third floor balcony.

Earlier this week, that day arrived.

Unintentionally, I caught sight of them. Out on my balcony I had merely sought to assess the weather and determine how I warmly I might dress. To my unaided eyes, they appeared to be white whiskers of winter frost. These whiskers seemed to sprout from land, desiccated and scrubby, stretching far, far beyond human habitation. I sought my Celestron 8 x 56 binoculars and looked again.

Holding the binoculars steady, I must have seen 15, or so, wind mills, winding the western wind, somersaulting slowly and steadily, twisting counterclockwise. Like pinwheels of childhood, spinning spryly in the spring breeze, they delight. Remembering, I smile still.

Actually, "wind turbines" is more correct. As later research revealed, these monumental three-bladed beasts can crank out 1.6 megawatts each! Megawatts! I would have guessed a few hundred kilowatts at most. They are not what they seem. Originally, I estimated them to be much smaller, and far closer. Yet my web searches using keywords "Albuquerque wind farms" turned up nothing. How could that be? Because their home, I discovered, the Red Mesa Wind Farm, is 48 miles due west. How then am I seeing them from that distance? Because each of them is 270 feet in diameter with a central hub 262 feet above the ground. Giants, graceful giants, 64 in total, turning in the breeze atop a mesa at an 8000 foot elevation. I lack the telephoto lens and tripod needed to photograph them. In lieu of that, I offer a satellite view of three of them.

Satellite view (via Google Earth) of Red Mesa Wind Farm, 

Cibola County, New Mexico, 35.261 N, 107.376 W. 

"But they kill birds." (So, too, do your cats.) "Not in my backyard! I might see them from my hot tub." (Heated how? By electricity? Generated how?)

We both agree, don't we, that the earth's climate is changing, and not in a good way? We need energy, as always, and new sources that do not put carbon into the air. Here then, in the distance, is a part of the answer. Were I a better writer I might more fully express what I see and what I feel: hope, elegance too, and a new spring, a rebirth of possibility. Percy Shelley expresses it well, in the closing words of his "Ode to the West Wind"  --

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of prophecy! O Wind
If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

posted: 2019-12-09, last edited: 2019-12-09