I just ordered Freeman Dyson’s new book Maker of Patterns on Amazon. Amazon thoughtfully inquired if I would like to start reading the book online, so I read the introduction and I have to say that I’m now even more excited to read the rest of the book.
Freeman Dyson is a 95 year old theoretical physicist from the UK, and he has lived through a lot of history. This book is a collection of letters he wrote to his parents from the 1940’s to the 1970’s; being written to his parents the letters don’t focus on technical details of his work, but rather on his experiences in the physics community and other events in his life.
I love listening to Dyson and reading his writing as his humility and honesty (I think these are the same thing) shine through. I initially was introduced to him through interviews where he talks about how climate change science has become more of a religion, and how he doesn’t like the PhD system.
You became a professor at Cornell without ever having received a Ph.D. You seem almost proud of that fact.
At 90, Freeman Dyson Ponders His Next Challenge
Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all. I was lucky because I got educated in World War II and everything was screwed up so that I could get through without a Ph.D. and finish up as a professor. Now that’s quite impossible. So, I’m very proud that I don’t have a Ph.D. and I raised six children and none of them has a Ph.D., so that’s my contribution.
His views on these topics really resonated with me, and made me want to learn more about this old physicist. Have any of you had a professor who when you ask them a tough question they don’t know the answer to they start to try and hide the fact that they don’t know the answer because they are embarrassed and possibly a little proud? If it’s a technical class they might try to throw some complicated formula at you to belittle your question and act as a smokescreen to hide their ignorance. Contrast that with the professor who confronted with a difficult question humbly acknowledges, “Wow, I really don’t know the answer to that.” They then go on to validate the importance of your question and start trying to come up with a way that a solution might be found. From what I’ve gathered of Freeman Dyson, he is the kind of scientist who would fall soundly into the second category.
In another excerpt from Maker of Patterns I read, Dyson talks about his interactions with Richard Feynman and his impressions of Feynman. Richard Feynman is another physicist I deeply admire for his ability to cut through the fluff and get to the heart of a problem. If you’re a physics nerd like me, I highly recommend Feynman’s QED lecture series which can be found on YouTube. Dyson spent time with both Feynman and Julian Schwinger, another physicist who like Feynman was working on problems in a field known as Quantum Electrodynamics. However, Schwinger was attacking the problem through complicated wave function calculations while Feynman was taking a totally different and more intuitive approach using path integrals. Dyson published a paper in 1949 called The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman and in it he proved that Feynman’s path integral approach and Schwinger’s wave function approach were actually equivalent.
I work in a technical field as an electrical engineer and use physics quite often in my job (not theoretical physics mind you, but old physics invented in the 1800s). One thing I find critical to being able to understand physics problems is to break them down into small atomic portions, each of which you can have an intuitive understanding of. I therefore LOVE reading textbooks by authors who have a good ability to intuitively explain physics concepts without resorting to unnecessarily complicated frameworks. In other words, people who can cut through all the poop shall we say. I feel like Freeman Dyson is one of these people and I’m very excited to read his book.