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New York Review Books
May 2015
On Sale: April 21, 2015
312 pages
ISBN: 1590178548
EAN: 9781590178546
Kindle: B00N6PBDPC
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
In this sequel to The Scientist as Rebel (2006),
Freeman Dyson—whom The Times of London calls “one of
the world’s most original minds”—celebrates openness to
unconventional ideas and “the spirit of joyful dreaming” in
which he believes that science should be pursued. Throughout
these essays, which range from the creation of the Royal
Society in the seventeenth century to the scientific
inquiries of the Romantic generation to recent books by
Daniel Kahneman and Malcolm Gladwell, he seeks to “break
down the barriers that separate science from other sources
of human wisdom.”
Dyson discusses
twentieth-century giants of physics such as Richard Feynman,
J. Robert Oppenheimer, Paul Dirac, and Steven Weinberg, many
of whom he knew personally, as well as Winston Churchill’s
pursuit of nuclear weapons for Britain and Wernher von
Braun’s pursuit of rockets for space travel. And he takes a
provocative, often politically incorrect approach to some of
today’s most controversial scientific issues: global
warming, the current calculations of which he thinks are
probably wrong; the future of biotechnology, which he
expects to dominate our lives in the next half-century as
the tools to design new living creatures become available to
everyone; and the flood of information in the digital age.
Dyson offers fresh perspectives on the history, the
philosophy, and the practice of scientific inquiry—and even
on the blunders, the wild guesses and wrong theories that
are also part of our struggle to understand the wonders of
the natural world.
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