Rebellious thoughts

“In spite of its title,” the author remarks, “this book is mostly not about rebel scientists.” In fact, it is a collection of Freeman Dyson’s essays and book reviews divided, rather arbitrarily, into four themed sections, of which only two focus mainly on science and scientists. I once proposed compiling a volume of my own book reviews to a publisher who turned the idea down flat. But then, I am not the inimitable stylist that Dyson is, nor can I call upon his deep erudition. One might add that many of his reviews are lengthy and discursive pieces from the New York Review of Books, often not of just a single book.

Such a compendium is a problem to review, since the subject matter is difficult to pin down. With that in mind, I will take the liberty of picking and choosing a few essays I admired, as well as some that I shook my head over. From my point of view, the most exciting of the four sections concerns issues of war, peace and morality. This section could have been titled “weapons and hope” and indeed contains three rewritten chapters from Dyson’s out-of-print book of that name. It also includes an analysis of pacifism as a moral force, in which Dyson draws parallels between the abolition of slavery and the continuing frustrated attempts to ban nuclear weapons, thus deriving some hope that the latter will one day be achieved.

One of the essays I was less pleased with was a review of Edward Teller’s memoirs, in which Teller comes across as basically a great guy with something of a flaw in his character. Other reviewers have pointed out discrepancies between Teller’s book and accounts of the same events, such as Janet Patterson’s The Ruin of Oppenheimer and Frances Fitzgerald’s Way Out There in the Blue. For instance, Teller’s complicity with advocates of bombing in the US Air Force to build a second, unnecessary weapons lab is well documented. Perhaps to those who Teller respected or found use for he was the cultivated and sweet piano-player that they describe, but in my experience his was an outsize ego feeding on the naive patriotism of the young and adapting his scientific judgments to his political prejudices.

By way of contrast, I very much enjoyed Dyson’s several essays about his friend Richard Feynman, who was indeed a “rebel scientist” if ever there was one. Unlike Teller, Feynman really did have an instinct for dealing wisely with the young, as charmingly confirmed in Leonard Mlodinow’s little book Some Time With Feynman.

In view of Dyson’s Templeton prize, a “conflict of interest” note might have been appropriate to some of his essays on science and religion. Nonetheless, I liked his contrast of the thinking of Feynman and John Polkinghorne, in which he concludes that there is no real equivalence between scientific thinking and theological analysis no matter how refined the latter may be. However, in this chapter he also claims that religions other than Christianity have no analytical theology, and hence do not identify so centrally a conflict with the teachings of science. I do not believe this is the case: creationism is alive and well in Islamic Turkey, for example, and is already a problem for educators of young Muslims in the UK.

I concur with Dyson’s take on the philosopher Daniel Dennett – that in confronting religion directly, he is attempting to eradicate one of the deepest instincts of the human character and so is bound to fail. However, I differ from Dyson in that I consider, as does Dennett, religion to be a deeply embedded evolved behaviour pattern, rather than an intellectually justifiable, or necessarily useful, concept.

Perhaps because I take a somewhat narrower-minded view of science than Dyson, I would not have cut Michael Crichton’s Prey, a scary science-fiction treatment of nanotechnology, quite so much slack. Personally, I would like to be convinced of a plausible danger before writing off a whole science – it is amusing that Crichton has become, since Dyson’s review, a high-profile global-warming denier.

The long essay from which the book takes its title is a tour de force of which I must approve because of its strong bias against bare-bones reductionism. The instance he emphasizes is not one I would have thought of, but it is a beauty: the black hole. Dyson points out that neither Einstein, whose equations foreshadowed the black hole, nor Oppenheimer, who showed how one could form, had much interest in the discovery. It was to them mere “phenomenology”, an uninteresting application of more fundamental principles. In fact, if relativity and quantum theory are ever to be reconciled, the black hole will surely turn out to be the first hint of a possible resolution.

It must be apparent by now that, whatever my cavils, I read the book with continuing amazement at Dyson’s ability to tie together a wide variety of intellectual threads, and great enjoyment of his command of language. Dyson justifiably enjoys a reputation as a highly literate author with an encyclopedia of subjects at his fingertips. Whatever he writes deserves to be read.