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Freeman dyson5/19/2023 ![]() Dyson threw himself into designing rockets driven by nuclear explosions, a potent means of propulsion. It was time for a jump into a different pool. A few years into the appointment, he abandoned particle physics. Dyson just missed the boat that by tradition has room for only three passengers, but he often said it was much better when people asked why you didn’t get a Nobel Prize, rather than why you did.Īfter a brief stay at Cornell, Dyson took up a permanent post at the Institute in 1953, where he stayed until the very end, walking every morning to his office to think and write. Nobel Prizes naturally soon followed - for Schwinger, Feynman and the Japanese physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, who had independently found a third approach. It was nothing less than the birth of modern particle physics. All these processes corresponded exactly with each of the separate calculations in Schwinger’s approach. For example, it could describe the emission of a photon by an electron and the subsequent absorption by a second electron, but also the reverse process where the second electron emitted the photon and the first absorbed it. A single diagram could in fact be drawn in space and time in many separate ways, interchanging cause and effect, and so each one could capture a whole range of particle behavior. In a flash he understood how Feynman’s straightforward diagrams could perfectly reflect Schwinger’s abstract algebra. In the summer of 1948, while traveling by Greyhound bus from San Francisco to Princeton, Dyson had an epiphany that united the two. Feynman at Cornell University, on the other hand, had posited a deceptively simple set of diagrams that described the interactions of particles in terms of their trajectories through space and time. Julian Schwinger at Harvard University had developed a complicated scheme of calculations that was comprehensive, but which few understood. Dyson described him as “half genius and half buffoon.” They made an immediate and lasting connection.Īt that time, there were two different approaches toward understanding particle physics. Among them was Richard Feynman, the quirkiest and most brilliant of the bunch. Together, they set their minds on resolving the mysteries of quantum theory. During a postwar visit to the United States, he was fortunate to join the group of young American physicists who had returned from Los Alamos after building the atom bomb. ![]() It was in his own youth that Dyson had his most celebrated result: the unification of two complementary views of quantum electrodynamics, the theory describing the interaction of light with charged matter. No, his young colleagues inspired him the most. Einstein rarely came to seminars, only when his friend Max von Laue visited, and Oppenheimer did little physics. ![]() When today’s younger scientists asked Dyson how it felt to be a physicist at the Institute in 1948, in those halcyon days when giants like Albert Einstein and Oppenheimer roamed the grounds, he had great pleasure telling them he wasn’t impressed at all by the famous men. (In 1958, Freeman married Imme Dyson, a master runner, with whom he had four daughters: Dorothy, Mia, Rebecca and Emily.) His colleagues included the future Nobel laureates Hideki Yukawa and Jack Steinberger, as well as Dyson’s first wife, Verena Haefeli, the mother of his eldest children, Esther and George. The English-born scientist came first to the Institute in 1948 as part of an exceptional group of young physicists and mathematicians working with the director, J. No life was more entangled with the Institute for Advanced Study, Dyson’s home in Princeton, New Jersey. The bird’s-eye perspective was not for him, and he had a lifelong suspicion of grand unified theories. He then moved into the design of nuclear reactors, nuclear-powered space travel, astronomy, astrobiology, climate change and futurism, all while being “a wise observer of the human scene.” He described himself as a frog, not a bird, as he enjoyed jumping from pool to pool, studying their details deeply in the mud. Trained as a mathematician, Dyson had an appetite for number theory, but his most famous achievement came early as a theoretical physicist, laying out the architecture of modern particle physics. When Freeman Dyson passed away in February at the age of 96, the world lost one of its most versatile scientists and astute humanists.
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