In 2012, for the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, New Scientist held a contest for its readers to vote for a curated list of what it called the 25 Most Influential Popular Science books. I resolved to eventually read all of them and after a couple year hiatus, this makes number 16 for me.

I didn’t realize this was a memoir. I was somewhat familiar with Dyson, the sphere being one (but he only popularized it, it turns out, “Some science fiction writers have wrongly given me the credit for inventing the idea of an artificial biosphere. In fact, I took the idea from Olaf Stapledon, one of their own colleagues”). And that he was on the wrong side of climate change. He was involved with quite a bit and I found his story enlightening. Like the source of the title:

“And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair...
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

t. s. eliot, The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1917”

Dyson includes several poem fragments. I’ve not yet been able to get enough understanding of poetry to pull anything from it, so, props to him. “For insight into human affairs I turn to stories and poems rather than to sociology. This is the result of my upbringing and background. I am not able to make use of the wisdom of the sociologists because I do not speak their language. ” Great fiction asks great questions… Tom Peters. I have more work to do.

I’m not sure why it was on that original list of 25, but it is still a good read. Now to decide which will be next.

Curated notes:

“She [Edith Nesbit] wrote The Magic City in 1910, when she was fifty-two. By that time her personal struggles were over and she could view the world with a certain philosophic calm.”
I like that.

“It makes no sense to me to separate science from technology, technology from ethics, or ethics from religion. I am talking here to unscientific people who ultimately have the responsibility for guiding the growth of science and technology into creative rather than destructive directions. If you, unscientific people, are to succeed in this task, you must understand the nature of the beast you are trying to control.”

[on Isaac Newton] “If he were not gifted with extraordinary strength of character, he could not do what he does in science.”
Newton? The man who excoriated anyone who disagreed with him?Yeah… strength of character… right.

“E. T. Bell’s book Men of Mathematics, a collection of biographies of the great mathematicians. This is a splendid book for a young boy to read (unfortunately, there is not much in it to inspire a girl, with Sonya Kowalewska allotted only half a chapter),”
One for The List that grows beyond the time I have to read.

“Technology has made evil anonymous. Through science and technology, evil is organized bureaucratically so that no individual is responsible for what happens.”
And it has only gotten more so.

“After a few months I was able to identify the quality that I found strange and attractive in the American students, They lacked the tragic sense of life which was deeply ingrained in every European of my generation. They had never lived with tragedy and had no feeling for it. Having no sense of tragedy, they also had no sense of guilt. They seemed very young and innocent although most of them were older than I was. They had come through the war without scars. ”
Pre 9/11 of course, but even with that, not much has changed.

[on Feynman] “Dick was also a profoundly original scientist. He refused to take anybody’s word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics. It took him five years of concentrated work to reinvent quantum mechanics. He said that he couldn’t understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning. ”

[on Edward Teller] “A careful reading of his testimony at the trial shows that he intended no personal betrayal. He wanted only to destroy Oppenheimer’s political power, not to damage Oppenheimer personally. But the mood of that time made such fine distinctions meaningless. ”

“Already in 1958 we could see that Von Braun’s moon ships, the ships that were to be used for the Apollo voyages to the moon ten years later, would cost too much and do too little. In many ways the Apollo ships were like the V-2 rockets. Both were brainchildren of Wernher von Braun. Both were magnificent technological achievements. Both were far too expensive for the limited job they were designed to do. ”
This still has not changed.

[on the Cuban Missile Crisis] “For example, in I960 we enjoyed a superiority in offensive missiles while the Soviet Union concealed its weakness by maintaining a missile bluff. We then demolished the Soviet missile bluff as conspicuously as possible with public statements of the results of U-2 photography, and so forced the Soviet Union to replace its fictitious missile force by a real one. It would have been much wiser for us to have left the Soviet bluff intact.”

[on a paper by John Phillips] “The media, as soon as they got hold of John’s story, exploited it with little regard for truth and with absolutely no regard for public safety. ”
Nothing new to see here. Move along.

“Most of the biological inventions which Aldous Huxley used a few years later as background for his novel Brave New World were cribbed from Haldane’s Daedalus. Haldane’s vision of a future society, with universal contraception, test-tube babies, and free use of psychotropic drugs, became a part of the popular culture of our century through Huxley’s brilliant dramatization. ”

“It is easy to imagine a highly intelligent society with no particular interest in technology. It is easy to see around us examples of technology without intelligence. When we look into the universe for signs of artificial activities, it is technology and not intelligence that we must search for. ”
SETT doesn’t ring as nicely as SETI

“The difference between green and gray is better explained by examples than by definitions. Factories are gray, gardens are green. Physics is gray, biology is green. Plutonium is gray, horse manure is green. Bureaucracy is gray, pioneer communities are green. Self-reproducing machines are gray, trees and children are green. Human technology is gray, God’s technology is green. Clones are gray, clades are green. Army field manuals are gray, poems are green.”

“In other words, to provide a permanently renewable energy supply for the whole world would only require us to duplicate on a worldwide scale the environmental and financial sacrifices that the United States has made for the automobile. The people of the United States considered the costs of the automobile to be acceptable. I do not venture to guess whether they would consider the same costs worth paying again for a clean and inexhaustible supply of energy. ”
Nope.

“In space as on earth, technology must be cheap if it is to be more than a plaything of the rich.”
Predicting the future of today?

“These notes are not intended to be complete. I put them here to avoid peppering the text with footnotes.”
I don’t find footnotes bothersome. Quite the opposite, actually. ( )

A good book written by a great thinker. ( )

Any book on science and philosophy that references E. Nesbit's "Magic City" throughout the first chapters has my respect and my attention. ( )

A fascinating life -- road trips with Feynman, coming back to an empty house to find Teller at the piano. And shot throughout the Olympian science of the 50s and 60s. ( )

The author is a physicist who has work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller in the period after World War II, as America and the Soviet Union rapidly escalated the Cold War, and the destructive power of nuclear weapons. And some of that escalation, it might be said at this point, could be attributed in a very small way to the work of Dyson in this period.

During the war - the hot one - while Oppenheimer and Teller worked on the Manhattan Project developing the Bomb, Dyson worked by the British Bomber Command, assessing damage inflicted on Germany and loss of planes and crew. Dyson's description of this period, and of his subsquent relocation to the United States is engaging and insightful. He is in the middle of the great clash between the physics community and Edward Teller that followed on from Teller's testimony against Oppenheimer and leaves the reader with a carefully balanced view of both. What is fascinating to read is Dyson's own description of his slide into his own 'Oppenheimer' moment, when he found himself opposing the ban on atmospheric nuclear testing, because it would put an end to his plan to develop nuclear (bomb) powered rocket travel.

And so the first 150 pages goes at a cracking pace, personalities and events thrown into new focus, and Dyson's focus is acute. His examples of using statistical analysis to deconstruct both scientific and social questions is a revelation and a reminder of how infrequently logical thinking drives the world. But after page 150 the book switches from an autobiography to becomes a carriage for Dyson's philosophies and a message to humanity. It all makes sense, but the energy goes out of the writing, and the reading. The next 100 pages or so were interminable, and I wished that I'd heard about Dyson's ideas through someone writing a biography about him, rather than hear them in his own voice. The sense of a man beating his own drum - for me - just drowned the message out.

But the biographical early part of the book is a priceless account of the US nuclear program in the late 1940's and 1950's, and for that I'll forgive this book its crimes against the reader. Highly recommended as a history of those scientists (and of himself), and again for it's demonstrations of the power of statistics in analysing social and safety issues. But as an introduction to the US nuclear program, or for anyone looking for an insight into the life of a scientist, well I'd start somewhere else.