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brooklynite

(94,354 posts)
Fri Feb 28, 2020, 03:16 PM Feb 2020

Freeman Dyson, a visionary and renaissance physicist, dies at 96

Source: Washington Post

Freeman Dyson, a visionary physicist and technophile who helped crack the secrets of the subatomic world, tried to build a spaceship that could carry humans across the solar system, worked to dismantle nuclear arsenals and wrote elegantly about science and human destiny, died Feb. 28 at a hospital near his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 96.

...snip...

Mr. Dyson, born in England between the world wars, spent most of his professional life as a kind of genius-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, overlapping in his early years with Albert Einstein.

In a career spent traversing fields as diverse as physics, biology, astronomy, nuclear energy, arms control, space travel and science ethics, Mr. Dyson was always obliging when a journalist called him for a grabby quote about the trajectory of humanity. His ideas were reliably un­or­tho­dox; the Pulitzer Prize-winning classical composer Paul Moravec once called him “the world’s most civil heretic.”

Of all his notions, his most famous was that alien civilizations, seeking to maximize their supply of energy, would build elaborate megastructures around their parent stars to capture much of the solar radiation. Astronomers periodically see something that they speculate might be one of these “spheres” — although Mr. Dyson freely admitted he lifted the idea from science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/freeman-dyson-a-visionary-and-renaissance-physicist-dies-at-96/2020/02/28/0ba462e0-5a58-11ea-ab68-101ecfec2532_story.html

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Freeman Dyson, a visionary and renaissance physicist, dies at 96 (Original Post) brooklynite Feb 2020 OP
That is my belief in how we will find the first evidence exboyfil Feb 2020 #1
If it worked as designed, you would never detect it... brooklynite Feb 2020 #2
Assuming they haven't beaten Thermodynamics exboyfil Feb 2020 #4
! Marcuse Feb 2020 #13
Dyson sphere NurseJackie Feb 2020 #3
He was amazing. Lucky Luciano Feb 2020 #5
Fascinating Fellow RIP burrowowl Feb 2020 #6
Elon Musk is trying to launch his own Dyson Sphere. lagomorph777 Feb 2020 #7
How many asteroids would you have to mine ... ? FiveGoodMen Feb 2020 #8
One of a kind. LunaSea Feb 2020 #9
That's awesome! LaurenOlimina Feb 2020 #14
First heard of him in high school TlalocW Feb 2020 #10
Was about to post that BumRushDaShow Feb 2020 #11
i just watched this episode for about the 5000th time a week ago lol Takket Feb 2020 #15
K&r for an amazing man uppityperson Feb 2020 #12
Dyson and Feynman were in many ways opposites, yet... hunter Feb 2020 #16

exboyfil

(17,862 posts)
1. That is my belief in how we will find the first evidence
Fri Feb 28, 2020, 03:23 PM
Feb 2020

of life outside of our biosphere. I think it has a better chance of success than looking for intentional radio signals.

We should be doing a full sky survey for our galaxy looking for these structures around other stars (we kind of already do that with our exoplanet detection methods). Also a survey looking for K-3 galactic civilizations in the 300 billion galaxies in the visible part of space.

brooklynite

(94,354 posts)
2. If it worked as designed, you would never detect it...
Fri Feb 28, 2020, 03:30 PM
Feb 2020

...all the energy (esp. light waves) would be captured.

exboyfil

(17,862 posts)
4. Assuming they haven't beaten Thermodynamics
Fri Feb 28, 2020, 03:35 PM
Feb 2020

you are actually looking for the heat signature of waste heat. That and the fact that few think that an entire sphere would ever be built. Most likely it would be a swarm. As far as a galactic civilization, you would see part of a galaxy obscured in the visible wavelength along with the waste heat signature.

A very simple Welcome mat would be putting something like a large triangle in orbit around a star (perhaps several in different planes). Using Kepler techniques you would know it is artificial very quickly. This is a very low energy approach vs. blasting radio waves.

LunaSea

(2,892 posts)
9. One of a kind.
Fri Feb 28, 2020, 06:49 PM
Feb 2020

He will be greatly missed.
I was once honored to illustrate some articles by Dyson
Thought I's share one with you.

Takket

(21,528 posts)
15. i just watched this episode for about the 5000th time a week ago lol
Sat Feb 29, 2020, 12:15 AM
Feb 2020

everyone should watch the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics". It is a great watch even if you aren't a fan!

hunter

(38,303 posts)
16. Dyson and Feynman were in many ways opposites, yet...
Sat Feb 29, 2020, 01:21 PM
Feb 2020
He (Dyson) was the first person after their creator to appreciate the power of Feynman diagrams and his paper written in 1948 and published in 1949 was the first to make use of them. He said in that paper that Feynman diagrams were not just a computational tool but a physical theory and developed rules for the diagrams that completely solved the renormalization problem. Dyson's paper and also his lectures presented Feynman's theories of QED in a form that other physicists could understand, facilitating the physics community's acceptance of Feynman's work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson#Career_in_the_United_States


Many of Dyson's opinions would be anathema to Democratic Underground. It seems to me his perspective was limited by his Christianity and the customary baggage of English prejudice.

Here's in interview with Dyson, and this tidbit:

An Obama supporter who describes himself as "100 per cent Democrat," Dyson says he is disappointed that the President "chose the wrong side." Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere does more good than harm, he argues, and humanity doesn't face an existential crisis. Climate change, he tells us, "is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?"

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/11/freeman_dyson_interview/






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