Freeman Dyson on Human Space Settlement – Interview October 3, 2019
Freeman Dyson. Credit: Monroem, Wikicommons . Having titled my forthcoming book Star Settlers: The Billionaires, Geniuses, and Crazed Visionaries out to Conquer the Universe , and certain that I had covered my quotient of crazed visionaries, I needed to interview at least one bonafide genius.The 97-year-old Dyson fit the bill . . . Early in his career he devised, as one biographer put it, “The Rosetta Stone for quantum electrodynamics,” the mathematical equations that reconciled Richard Feynmann’s diagrams of quantum interactions with Julian Schwinger’s apparently contradictory mathematical descriptions. Dyson also had long been a spacefaring advocate, concocting concepts beloved among science fiction writers such as the Dyson Tree, a bio-engineered plant designed to provide comets with an atmosphere. He died four months after we spoke, making this one of his last interviews. No doubt a few more television crews and journalists showed up at the Institute for Advanced